Adopting Common Data Model

[Anonymous]

Hi,
We are a university and we are looking to adopt Common Data Model. Currently we are building powerapps and flow on top of SharePoint lists, but we are hoping to trail out CDM to better integrate our business processes. I was wondering if anyone in the community has gon e through this journey. My questions around CDM are:
1. How can we move our data which is stored in SharePoint to CDM.
2. How are the entities defined. By this I mean how do we as a business decide which peice of data is an entity.
3. What are the best practices around storing data in CDM.

THANKS,
Nishant

[Drrickryp · Accepted solution]

Hi @Anonymous 

The answer to  your questions is more complex than can be addressed in this post. It involves examining and planning the underlying structure of the back end of the database.  This consists of Tables and the Relationships between them.  Entities in CDS are basically tables enhanced with metadata and the principles of database construction apply here. If you are not familiar with these principles, I have a number of posts in the Community blog to help a new PowerApps user understand this structure starting with /Database-Design-Fundamentals-and-PowerApps-An-Overview/

I moved all of my data from SharePoint to CDS about a year ago.  In my opinion, CDS is the best back end for PowerApps as it is the native datasource.   My database consisted of a number of lists, some containing as many as 50k items.  I did it by saving each list as an excel spreadsheet and using PowerQuery to shape the resulting tables. Most of the default entities did not suit my purposes so I created Custom entities for each table and imported the data.  There are several videos describing how to start with CDS and they can be found with a Google Search on Common Data Service, Model Driven Apps and PowerApps.