Power Platform | The environment jeopardy bonus round!

You might have recognized my three part episode on environment strategy for Power Platform and walked through Part I and Part II already. If not, this is your last chance before the bonus round, you don’t want to miss.

Today I’d like to somehow answer the question of how many environments might be good, optimum or to be considered. As we started, I introduced you to this visual.

Environment strategy- default + Microsoft Teams

This already could be your optimum, assuming you’re a small company with a lot of work happening inside Microsoft Teams and some SharePoint usage. But there are other companies that might feel familiar with a setup like the following.

Environment strategy- dedicated + Micosoft Teams

In this scenario I would assess your company using SharePoint with customized forms (Power Apps), some flows triggered based on SharePoint Lists. Some of your Teams or your plant workers organized themselves in Microsoft Teams and channels where some apps, flows and intelligent chatbots can be found and additionally, your citizen developers created some medium to large LoB like apps, flows or chatbots in dedicated departmental environment setup. Pretty rock-solid setup and environment strategy. What else?

Environment strategy- shared, dedicated + Microsoft Teams

Well, as I mentioned medium to large LoB apps, chatbots or flows, it might ring a bell in terms of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM). So for this case you could have additional shared environments as sandboxes or production environments (I recommend not using trials for this) and you would develop and test your apps first in those environments by smaller group of people and finally move them to production departmental environment.

Hopefully, this answers your question on what should be the bare minimum, what’s the optimum or best recommendation in terms of the amount of environments in your organization. Do you need to start in the last scenario? Of course not, but your environment strategy hopefully allows for such growth without causing any issues.

If not, time for a review and adjustment with what you’ve learned in this bonus round. Hope you enjoyed the episode, let me know in comments or tweets. Until then,…