Power Pages: What early upgrade means

There is a little-known, and often neglected checkbox In the Power Pages admin portal…

What does this do? Well, let's talk about how Power Pages updates work first.

Pages updates are two-fold: updates to the Power Pages solution and updates to the website host (what forms the actual Power Pages website).

Power Pages solutions
Power Pages configurations are stored in Dataverse. Dataverse leverages solutions that contain the metadata tables for Power Pages. These solution must be manually updated by an administrator via the Power Platform admin center. This should be done with every Major release and should be done outside of business hours.


Website host updates
The two types of website host updates are:

Major
Follow the Wave Release spring and fall release cycle of the rest of the Power Platform. Major releases include new functionalities.

Monthly
These are generally rolled out in the first two weeks of every month and contain proactive bug fixes for functionality, bug fixes for those logged by customers through support, and security + performance fixes. In order to bring more transparency to our releases, we publish a tentative start date for upcoming deployments. This date reflects the release data for the early upgrade stage of the deployment, but is tentative and can change.

We list our planned update dates here: Released Versions of Power Apps Portals - Release Notes | Microsoft Learn

To get the exact date for the deployment, refer to the M365 message center posts. Not sure how to do that? Check out how to configure notifications here and how to subscribe to email notifications here.

Now, back to that checkbox.

Early upgrades

The option to Enable portal for early upgrade found in the Power Pages admin center refers to monthly updates to the website host. This allows you to test your websites for impacts of the monthly updates early. Note that this is not a way to preview a specific new feature -- those are tied into the major updates/Wave Releases.

As a best practice, critical projects -- especially those with UX or pro dev customizations -- should have a lower test environment with early upgrade enabled-- or rather, have the box checked. Do not check this box in a production or critical path development environment. If you do have early upgrade enabled in a production or critical dev environment, you are bringing in a risk to project blockers. I have also seen scenarios where the production environment gets upgraded early but the sandbox does not… resulting in a mismatch of versions that can cause issues with importing your solutions.

Do note that, although you can enable or disable a Power Pages website for early upgrade at any time, a snapshot is taken for all websites marked for early access two days before any release. Any website marked for early access after that is not guaranteed to get an early upgrade.

If you do encounter any issue during the upgrade phase, you can open a Microsoft support ticket via the Power Platform admin center.

Resources

• There is no Power Pages without Dataverse
• Power Pages: How a Microsoft Cloud Solution Architect can help
• Microsoft Learn: Upgrade Portal

Skylar Shonblom