Getting Started
Cartographer is a free, model-driven app (MDA) that runs inside your Power Platform environment. It crawls your Dataverse solutions, discovers every component, and generates human-readable documentation from deterministic templates — no AI, no API key, nothing sent to any external service. After installation, find it in the Power Apps app launcher (apps.powerapps.com) or in the app list within your environment. Look for the Cartographer app with the VerseBlocks icon.
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 — Configure which solutions to crawl and manage crawl schedules.
- 2Component Dashboard — Browse all discovered components by type with search and filters.
- 3Automation Map — Visualize automations per table as interactive diagrams.
- 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.
Crawl
Select which solutions to crawl. Cartographer queries the Dataverse metadata APIs to discover every component in each solution.
Discover
Components are categorized by type — tables, columns, forms, views, plugins, flows, web resources, and more — and stored for analysis.
Summarize
Each component gets a plain-English summary, generated deterministically from its own crawled metadata at crawl time. No AI model, no API key, nothing sent to an external service.
Document
Browse the component dashboard, generate automation maps, create user guides, and export to CSV, JSON, XLSX or DOCX. Documentation that stays in sync with your environment.
Quick Start
You can go from zero to a fully documented solution in about five minutes.
- 1
Install Cartographer
Install from Microsoft AppSource, or import the managed solution files manually. AppSource is the recommended path — it handles the VBCore dependency automatically.
- 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. See Installation for the full walkthrough.
- 3
Add a crawl configuration
Go to Solution Manager, click Add Solution, and select which Dataverse solution you want to document.
- 4
Run a crawl
Click Crawl Now on your solution. Cartographer discovers every component and writes a plain-English summary for each one. A re-crawl of an untouched solution finishes in seconds — only changed components are reprocessed.
- 5
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.
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| Component Dashboard | Browse all discovered components by type with search and filters |
| Summaries | Plain-English descriptions generated deterministically from crawled metadata — no AI involved |
| Automation Map | Visualize automations per table as interactive diagrams, downloadable as SVG |
| Compass | Monitoring and control for cloud flows, plugin steps, environment variables, and business rules |
| User Guides | Template-generated documentation for each model-driven app |
| Best Practice Analysis | Analyze solutions against best-practice rules, scored out of 100 |
| Exports | CSV, JSON, XLSX, and DOCX for sharing and reporting |
Requirements
- A Microsoft Dataverse environment (Power Apps, Dynamics 365, or standalone Dataverse)
- System Administrator or System Customizer security role for the installing user
- No credit card, trial, or purchase — every feature is free and unlimited
Next Steps
Ready to install? Head to the installation guide for detailed step-by-step instructions.