Hi @FW-07051511-0
Dataverse can feel intimidating at first when you come from SharePoint, but once you spend some time building with it, the security and relationship model starts to make much more sense. For the right solutions, it can become easier to manage than SharePoint.
For an HR app, I would be careful about compromising the design to avoid premium licensing. In a medium or large organisation, the cost of poor access control, GDPR issues, missing audit history or exposing the wrong employee record can be much higher than the licence cost.
@timl and @ have already covered some important points. A few things I would add:
The biggest area is record ownership and security. You need to work out who owns each record, how HR, managers and employees get access, and whether you need owner teams, access teams, Entra group teams or business units.
For example, a manager may need access to an absence case but should not see medical details, grievance notes or HR-only comments.
Starting with an ERD is the right move, but spend time on relationship behaviour and cascading rules. Reassigning, sharing or deleting one record can affect related records depending on how the relationship is configured.
For HR data, I would avoid hard deletion in most cases. Deactivation, retention and controlled access usually make more sense.
Auditing also needs to be considered early. Decide which tables and columns need audit history, how long the organisation needs to keep it, and how much storage that may create over time.
Watch the security context of Power Automate flows as well. A flow running under an account with broad permissions can bypass the user-facing security model and update records outside the access rules you designed.
I would not dismiss model-driven apps too quickly either. A Canvas App may still be the right choice for employees and managers, but a model-driven app can save a lot of work for HR administration, case management, views, timelines and support.
The ALM side also has a few Dataverse-specific behaviours worth understanding, especially Updates versus Upgrades, solution layers and partial deployments.
Capacity is another area to check early, especially database storage, file storage, audit growth and attachments. For larger document volumes, SharePoint may still be the better place for the files, with Dataverse holding the case and metadata.
I would build a small proof of concept first with an employee table, an HR case table, manager access, HR access, field security, auditing and deployment between environments.
Once those pieces work, Dataverse becomes much less scary.
