Why Power Platform admins need to be SharePoint admins too.
SharePoint lists are too integrated and deserve better.
Recently, I came across a post that Microsoft Power Automate has 10 million daily active users. Awesome? Looking at the scale (230 million users for teams), not as much for a product geared towards citizen developers and in my experience the most used product in enterprise automation.
This means we can safely assume Power Platform has a lot of room to grow.
Here come SharePoint Lists.
People hate SharePoint lists for whatever reasons. Some hate it just because it enables anyone to create an application or automation by acting as a database. Some because they can't sell their customers dataverse or SQL. The latter fill the Power Platform “Expert” Space.
Facts are:
There is a separate market for Excel modernization and SharePoint Lists isn't the leader there:
There is competition from companies like Airtable (Read this) which provide amazing ways to build interfaces on data (2000 rows are free). That is what Microsoft is hoping to emulate/copy.
Dataverse isn't as good as people claim to be in practice: Dataverse comes in with a massive promise. But ultimately it's down to the developers using it to use it to the best of their knowledge. And most times, there aren't good dataverse engineers to make those good decisions as it isn't as popular as SQL or as easy as SharePoint Lists.
80% of apps are built on top of SharePoint lists from my experience. This is mainly due to ease of use and ‘free’ licensing. Even when there is dataverse for teams, people prefer SharePoint lists.
Most apps need data storage/file storage and SharePoint lists provide that by default and in theory have 25GB minimum storage. This would cost an org 25*800 (20,000 AUD) per year if using dataverse for the same.
Limits on SharePoint are quite generous: 30 million rows can be stored against a SharePoint list. If you know what you're doing, it is a very good static database replacement.
I realise dataverse has its own benefits, but at the moment, it makes sense for Microsoft to keep both. SharePoint lists is a much cheaper way to keep customers using the Power Platform because the competition is fierce. Also, dataverse makes sense to compete with platforms like Salesforce which they are actively trying to do.
As CoE team, we should always recognise above and embrace both SharePoint list and dataverse and provide support/advice on both. I will argue that the Power Platform governance should include SharePoint Administrator rights.
