Power Platform | The environment jeopardy!

What seems a provocative title for today’s article actually started with a simple question the other day in a design thinking workshop: How many environments are enough or bare minimum or what should be the optimum?

Since an environment strategy is something a Power Platform Admin should carefully think about – wait only a Power Platform Admin? – well in fact since the Admin task of managing and deploying an environment is no longer bound to licensing, this task or strategy should be a combined thought by Global-, Power Platform- and Dynamics 365 Admin roles.

Environment strategy- simplified approach

I guess you feel remembered when looking at the above visual, but since the world continues to offer new opportunities, so we do see new capabilities been added, since I last time reviewed this during a collaboration when writing the Admin Whitepaper. So what has changed since then as many of above rules still apply?

Environment strategy- default and Microsoft Teams

First of all the default environment which now can be added a Microsoft Dataverse as well. Additionally, to Power Apps and Power Automate flows seen from SharePoint, there’s now Power Virtual Agents in place as well. Furthermore, you do have the opportunity to add Microsoft Teams environment (up to 500) based on Microsoft Dataverse for Teams (weather you’re using it to be included in your apps, flows or intelligent chatbots or not). Some of the data of those tools will be stored in Microsoft Dataverse for Teams in the background.

Default environment specials

With that, we should be reminded on some specials that occur for the default environment which you can find in the visual above. But when considering an environment strategy for your company you might ask for more. What’s behind the Micosoft Dataverse to be provisioned or not?

Persona Profiles regarding security

That brings us to above visualized persona profiles. Cause we’re not yet talking about Microsoft Dataverse being used as a datasource for your apps, flows or chatbots – we’re focusing first on the environment access- and Dataverse Maker control. Last one to allow Makers to create new tables, modify or add fields, add relationships and many more.

As best practice, you therefore might like to introduce the concept of using Azure Active Directory security groups for a more simplistic management of all your users being in one of above ‚buckets‘ + managing them to have the right licensing in place.

Keep reminded that some of the task are independent of licensing – therefore adjust your strategy. But before we’re diving into more details where I’ve recognized you would need multiple doc articles to read through, enjoy your day and see you next time. Until then,…