Getting Started

What is Cartographer?

Power Platform environments grow fast. Tables, flows, plugins, business rules, web resources, and custom controls accumulate across solutions and often lack any documentation. New team members spend weeks figuring out what already exists. Cartographer solves this.

Cartographer is a managed Dataverse solution that installs directly into your environment as a model-driven app. All features are accessed as pages within this single app — you will see them in the sidebar when you open it:

• 1Solution Manager — Add the solutions you want documented and crawl them. Then search the components in plain English and generate user guides, reports and exports.
• 2Component Dashboard — Browse all discovered components by type with search and filters.
• 3Automation Map — Pick a table and see the plugin steps, business rules, classic workflows and cloud flows registered on it as a diagram.
• 4Compass — Monitoring and control. Manage cloud flows, plugin steps, environment variables, and business rules from a single dashboard.
• 5Best Practices — Analyze solutions against best-practice rules.
• 6Activation — Activate Cartographer with your name, company and email. No license key, no plan to choose.

How It Works

Cartographer follows a four-step process to turn raw customizations into clear documentation.

Quick Start

A fresh install in an empty environment took about five minutes. Activating, adding a solution and the first crawl come after that.

1. 1

   Install Cartographer

   Get it free on AppSource, or import the managed solution files manually from the downloads page. AppSource is the recommended path — it handles the VBCore dependency automatically.

2. 2

   Activate

   Open the Activation page, enter your name, company name and email address, and click Activate. That is the entire flow — no license key, no plan to choose. Activating can take up to 30 seconds. It registers a free license with VerseBlocks, which receives those details, your organization ID and your environment URL. The privacy policy lists everything Cartographer sends. See Installation for the full walkthrough.

3. 3

   Add a crawl configuration

   Go to Solution Manager. At the foot of Configured Solutions, pick a solution, choose a frequency and click Add Solution. Managed and unmanaged solutions both work. Adding a solution does not crawl it yet. Scheduled crawls need a Dataverse connection and two cloud flows switched on, covered in Enable Scheduled Crawling. Crawl Now works without them.

4. 4

   Run a crawl

   Click Crawl Now on your solution. Cartographer discovers the components in the solution, writes a plain-English summary for each one, and then indexes the new components for search, which takes up to about a second each. Keep Solution Manager open until the button finishes. A re-crawl of an untouched solution takes seconds for tens of components, because only changed components are reprocessed.

5. 5

   Ask a question

   Once components are indexed, a Search panel appears in Solution Manager. Type a question in plain English, such as "who is allowed to read records", and click Search. You get the 10 closest components, ranked by meaning. Judge them by their order, because the percentage shown with each is a raw similarity score. See Semantic Search for how it works.

6. 6

   View your dashboard

   Open the Component Dashboard to see every component organized by type, each already carrying its generated summary.

Key Features at a Glance

Every feature below is free and unlimited — there are no tiers, no add-ons, and nothing to upgrade.

Requirements

• A Microsoft Dataverse environment (Power Apps, Dynamics 365, or standalone Dataverse)
• System Administrator or System Customizer security role for the installing user
• Other users need a Cartographer role. Cartographer Admin is required to activate, crawl and generate guides, and Cartographer Reader can view, search, run the Report and export. The role must also be added to the app before the app appears for them.
• No credit card, trial, or purchase — every feature is free and unlimited