Power Platform Environments and Governance Tips

The Microsoft Power Platform enables individual solutions to be developed and business processes to be easily automated. When it comes to controlling the solutions, it is important to establish an IT governance in the organization. There are many areas and details about it. For this reason, I've put together a summary here with some news and helpful tips.

The Microsoft Power Platform includes Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power Virtual agents, leveraging the common infrastructure of the Microsoft Dataverse (the former Common Data Service) and Data Connectors. Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform are both deeply coupled with Dataverse and are held in containers called environments. A governance strategy usually starts with organizing the environments accordingly. Environments allow to separate Production, Test and Development. See more at Environments overview and at Microsoft Power Platform guidance documentation.

The Default Environment

This environment is special: It is automatically created with the first user in the region closest to the Azure AD tenant. Since the following rules are important, I copied it more from The default environment documentation and added some more environment scenarios info:

• Every user in the Microsoft 365 tenant, who has a PowerApps license, can access the Default environment.
• New users that sign up for PowerApps are automatically added to the Environment Maker role.
• No users will be added to the Environment Admin role of the default environment automatically. More information: Administer environments in Power Apps.
• Default environments contains only the roles for Environment Maker and Environment Admin (unless you have provisioned a Dataverse which adds more roles to the security model)
• You can't delete the default environment, but you can rename it.
• You can't backup and restore the default environment.
• The default environment is limited to 32 GB of storage capacity. In case you need to store more data, you can create a production environment. More information: Provisioning a new environment
• Check out the Recommendations / Best Practices
• Power Apps being created or customized Forms for SharePoint will be ending up in the default environment (see the *Update below)
• Flows being created in SharePoint lists will be ending up in the default environment
• Microsoft´s intention is to create personal apps in here. It should not be used as a production environment if there is a need for full control. From a governance perspective it is still not understandable why this environment cannot be managed by the tenant admins in the same way as the other environments.

General tips for working with environments

1. Plan your environment strategy and set up the correct permissions.
2. Set up Data loss prevention (DLP) policies to control organizational data flows.
3. Use the Featured and Hero app setting to point out the most relevant PowerApps in your organization.
4. Monitor the Power Automate analytics and the Power Apps analytics to see the consumption of usage, location, performance and connectors - or use custom solutions or tools for monitoring and notifications.

* Update: Change the SharePoint custom form environment

There is a brand new feature to change the Forms for SharePoint environment. My colleague Peter Hödl gave me a hot tip to a blog post from July 1st: In the article PowerShell support for Power Apps, there is a PowerShell cmdlet Set-AdminPowerAppSharepointFormEnvironment that allows to specify which environment SharePoint custom forms are saved to, instead of the default environment. So, an admin can use the following commands to read and to change the environment for SharePoint custom forms:

Get-AdminPowerAppSharepointFormEnvironment

Set-AdminPowerAppSharepointFormEnvironment –EnvironmentName 'EnvironmentName'

Although that sounds very simple, this is a really useful setting to change the SharePoint custom form environment.
Note: Existing custom forms don't automatically migrate to the newly designated environment, just new forms. Only production environments may be designated for SharePoint custom forms. Check it out at Designate SharePoint custom form environment. Thx for the tip, Peter!

More tips

• Use the Power Platform Admin Center as Administrator with short URL aka.ms/ppac
• Decide how you want to use the environment scenarios: Defining a Power Platform Environment Strategy
• See a bunch of useful tips at Top 15 best practices when configuring Power Platform and Dataverse
• Developers check out Benedikt's Power Platform Blog
• Log Who deleted something
• Compare the use of Power Automate vs Azure Logic Apps
• Implement the Center of Excellence (CoE)
• Try the Power Platform Governance with Power Clarity (If you don’t have a power governance solution, and need one in 15 minutes, we are your… service.)
• Download the Power Platform Admin and Governance Whitepaper.pdf
• Read The environment jeopardy!
• Evaluate our Governance Toolkit 365
• Find some PowerShell scripts at my PowerPlatformGovernance repository
• New: Build automated software development lifecycle workflows with GitHub Actions for Microsoft Power Platform
• New features of Power Apps
• Find related articles to the Power Platform and M365: Microsoft 365 PnP Blog

Power Apps Pricing drops by 50% by October

Microsoft recently announced a new pricing and licensing for the Power Power Apps that will go into effect on October 1, 2021:

• See the Current pricing of Power Apps (Power Apps per user plan is $40 and per app plan is $10)
• Updates coming to Power Apps (Simplified Power Apps Pricing coming October 1st)
• Starting October 2021, Power Apps per user prices change from $40/month to $20/month, and Power Apps per app changes from $10/month to $5/month
• The Power Apps per app plan now includes ONE app, not two apps, as as until now.
• Until end of September, potential Power Apps customers can use a promotional offer for $12 and $3. Any existing contracts will get the new prices starting by October 1st.
• (AFAIS, the pricing for Power Automate is unchanged: https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/)
• See more about licensing at Power Apps and Power Automate licensing FAQ

I hope this summary helps to support your governance plans for the Microsoft Power Platform.

Categories: Cloud, English, Microsoft, Microsoft365, Office365, PowerApps, Power Platform, Governance, App, Business Intelligence

Source: https://blog.atwork.at/post/Power-Platform-Environments-and-Governance-Tips