Shhh, there's no such thing as Microsoft Dataflex

As long time members of the Microsoft community will recognize, there is a certain level of (controlled) chaos that runs in the the Microsoft marketing arm. We're no strangers to products being rebranded, reverting back to old brands and being rebranded again.

Do we still remember that for a few months that Word was rebranded to Microsoft Office Word, instead of just Microsoft Word, only to be returned to it's old brand later? The name Customer Engagement disappearing within only a few short years after being introduced as a catch-all replacement for former Dynamics CRM, Skydrive turning into OneDrive and, the list goes on.

Those all pale in comparison to the Microsoft Dataflex debacle though. A name that was introduced with classic Microsoft confusion, only to be pulled within two weeks time.

It was introduced during Microsoft Inspire 2020, on Wednesday July 21 and it was ereased from history by Monday August 10.

What happened?

Turns out that Dataflex was a brand name already being used for many years by another company (whoops!). The Data Access Company has used the name Dataflex for many year for their own low code platform (double whoops). What possessed Microsoft to publicly announce the adoption of this name is an absolute puzzle.

People started to wonder whether Microsoft would've purchased the Dataflex product from the Data Access Company or perhaps taken over the Data Access Company but, that didn't seem to be the case at all. Surely this was a mistake, why wouldn't anyone double-check if that name wasn't already in use?!

A little under a fortnight later, poof it was all gone. Microsoft had dropped the name and started calling it Project Oakdale. Alls blog articles and press articles were replaced overnight and there was no longer a Microsoft Dataflex.

What was Microsoft Dataflex? And where is it now?

In classic Microsoft fashion, a new product announcement came with a similtanous rebranding of something else.

There was an announcement for a new low code app development platform Microsoft Dataflex, which allowed business users to easily create structured tables to store data through Microsoft Teams and build Power Apps on top of that.

The second part of the announcement was that the Common Data Service for Apps is being rebranded to Dataflex Pro. The actual service wasn't changing, it's name was being aligned with the other Dataflex offering. The introduction of these two things at the same time, plus the issue about the name, caused more confusion than clarity.

Now, the original idea of Microsoft Dataflex lives on as Project Oakdale. It's a light-weight version of the Common Data Service, which runs inside of Microsoft Teams.

Read more about Project Oakdale is Microsoft's revised announcement:
https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/introducing-project-oakdale-a-new-low-code-data-platform-for-microsoft-teams/