Sharepoint vs Dynamics 365 & Dataverse

[Mrvelup]

Hello, 

I have been developing a SharePoint Online business system for the last 1.5yrs at my company (whilst doing many other roles!).  It includes:

• PowerApps-based timesheets, automatic invoice production, inventory logging and health & safety form-filling;
• PowerBI-based reports using the SharePoint Online List data;
• SharePoint Online Lists for employee data, employee roles & responsibilities, purchase orders, invoices received, invoices issued, project number & folder management, inventory lists, customer information.

It has grown incredibly popular because of the user-friendly interface SharePoint Online offers. I want to implement similar systems to other willing businesses, but I am not convinced SharePoint Online is the best service given an option of Dataverse.

The only, and a major downfall of SharePoint is that I cannot look-up & link data from different SharePoint Site Lists.  E.g. I cannot look-up & link a supplier name from the Procurement Site to a list on the Project Management site.  Yes, I can look-up the name but it does not link which means if I wanted to update a spelling mistake on the supplier name (just an example), I would have to change it manually in every single record on the Project Management site rather than just the once on the Procurement Site.

Whereas, I can see the Dataverse allows all tables to look-up and connect which would be magical; however I do not believe the Dataverse table data can be presented at all, let alone in a user-friendly way.

Sorry for the rant, but my questions are:

1. Is it best to carry on with the SharePoint system, ignoring everything Dataverse-related, and suck up the fact I cannot look-up data from other SharePoint sites?
2. Is there a way to present Dataverse tables in a user-friendly way?

Cheers guys.

[#2 · Accepted solution]

I would suggest use model driven app to deal with dataverse tables, you can create views, customize forms, and use then in app, have search, and much more. Trend is now that you can converge canvas power apps with model driven, so you can connect to more data sources, not DV only.
It also play nicely with power automate flows and power BI:
We are using model driven power app as lightweight CRM in our environment. In fact, Dynamic 365 are model driven apps but more sophisticated as built by MS itself. .

And create basic model driven app around Dataverse table takes literally 10 minutes. 

[#3]

Thank you for this. This has helped immensely.