An Access connector for PA sounds cool. Honestly, in my environment, I'm at the mercy of which 'connectors' my corporation will install/make available in our Flows environment(s). They haven't even installed File System connector or SQL Server connector yet! Even without a proper back end, I could make a LOT of use out of a file system connector....., But, I suppose that the security implications of things like network shares, permissions of flow creator, service accounts, is a bit daunting from an I.T. perspective, I have to assume it is.
However, this reminds me a little bit of people who want to create an SSIS package that connects to an Access database.
IMHO, doing that is missing the point, in a way--unless of course, you have zero choice, which I can appreciate it happens sometimes.
I
thought that Dataverse sounded pretty good ... it's the whole atmosphere of encouraging serious entity relationships, and is also (I think) the base for creating a model-based Power Apps app, rather than a canvas-based Power Apps app, the former of which enforces typical relational constraints and the latter of which doesn't, and is most often chosen by those who wish to exercise their
amateurism/risky apps free will.
But who knows. In my current job, my 2 paths for Power Automate and Power Apps is basically to
1) keep using Sharepoint Online as the back end, which is available to me now, or
2) hope that soon, promised, they will open up SQL Server as a back end to Power Apps.
For some reason I don't think they have the appetite for creating the new, expansive governance processes that Dataverse would require....but who knows.
As many reasons as I could give myself to be unthankful at this job due to odd choices of tools, I have to be thankful: I AM learning some new things, even if they're things I didn't particularly want to learn and may be of little use in the future. I still get some satisfaction!
For example, the other day I successfully ran Access VBA to update a long Sharepoint list including a column which was a multi-valued "choices" field.
After reading a dozen articles that said you couldn't, I decided to just follow Microsoft's general advice for updating MVFs and sure enough, it was not that bad. However, I'd hate to really rely on it, since Sharepoint-with-Access wakes up some mornings and just tells me "no", on something that worked yesterday. This was for an ad-hoc yearly need, and I advised the business partner to temper any promises they made to others regarding this update with my confidence level of approximately 80%. With that, I did my job.
