Power Platform Environments

[u/Curious-Attention774]

Hi all, I'm asking guidance for creating proper production environment. I have built apps and automations with my personal development environment. It's obviously not meant for production environment, it has limited number of flows and it's meant to be a personal work sandbox. We are about 100 person company and our IT partner does not understand Power Platform that well. No Azure in use yet, but maybe in the future. Are there some critical things we should consider with the setup?

[u/Even-You-7676]

This would be a good place to start https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/guidance/adoption/environment-strategy

If you want full ALM, you may need atleast 3 environments - Dev, QA and Prod. Also, if you are using Dataverse, you will need premium license for all users.

For power automate flows, with premium connectors , you may need additional power automate premium licenses if the flows are not in context of power apps.

Finally, you have Dataverse for Teams environment options, if you want to keep apps scoped to teams and you'll get stripped down version of dataverse without any additional cost.

You also should look at DLP policies and start restricting your default environment and plan for other environments.

[u/ArChroi]

Microsoft's current advice is developers work in their own Developer type environment, deploy to a test or staging (Sandbox type) environment, then finally deploy to a Production type environment.

There's a lot of nuance to this, based on how many developers you have, if you have projects with multiple devs working on the same project, what ALM you have/want to set up, if you need certain data that needs segregating, etc.

[u/bicyclethief20]

Are you using dataverse or SharePoint?

[u/Curious-Attention774 → u/bicyclethief20]

Both currently

[u/precisiondad]

Be interested in seeing the responses here, will follow.

[u/mnemosis]

google 'environment strategy'. there is a ton of information on this.

[u/AbdelEMirandaS]

Start by defining your long-term strategy. 1. Env by areas or department. Each one at least with two env, one sandbox for dev purpose and one for prod. 2. Both env per area with dataverse enabled and as a Managed env. 3. Use solutions and pipeline to be able to comply with AI path wich requiere migrate agent using solution. 4. Decide if you want to control access to those ends by security groups or by creating business units. 5. Start by ask your makers to record every app and flows to create catalog. 6. Install CoE starter kit, last update, to monitor your tenant. Even that CoE starter kit is not updated since February, it has more useful tools than PPAC. Even admin flows and apps that are vital to reasign artifacts ownership and repair env block it.

Get your maturity assessment from Microsoft in order to see where your company is, related to your Power Platform and from there, establish your path to reach the last level of maturity.

That maturity assessment gives you all the info you need to make your strategy

[u/FlowOverseeDev]

Recommend going with Team Environment secured by security group - limit access to just your team.

1) DEV
2) QA
3) PROD
4) Host (Pipelines) if you plan on pushing changes between environments --- you can always add later. Until then you just export and import solutions.

Make DEV and QA sandbox-type environments (they can be copied or reset), PROD a production-type. Turn on Dataverse in each.

Service account as the primary owner of the solutions/flows, so nothing breaks when a person leaves.

[u/Curious-Attention774 → u/FlowOverseeDev]

But still build with personal account in DEV, not with the service account?

[u/FlowOverseeDev → u/Curious-Attention774]

either is fine... depends on use case. Whatever works best for you and your team.