As organizations expand their Microsoft Power Platform footprint to meet the needs of their users for application modernization and the inclusion of Microsoft Copilot, administrators can utilize premium features such as managed environments to govern at-scale quickly and easily, while increasing visibility and control. However, as more environments are deployed, administrators need a way to streamline governance and ensure consistency.

Explore more about environment groups and rules in the official documentation.

Making governance at-scale even easier
Environment groups empower admins to establish governance policies through customizable rules, ensuring consistency across environments and eliminating chaos. Microsoft Power Platform administrators can create environment groups. These groups serve as holders for related environments. You can use environment groups to organize your environments by department, project, cost center, or any other relevant criteria, offering a systematic way to manage collection of environments in aggregate.

In each environment group, administrators can uniformly apply six key capabilities of managed environments to all associated environments. These include setting sharing restrictions for canvas apps, utilizing AI to generate app and solution summaries, and enforcing best practices with solution checker—eliminating the need for manual solution checking. This initial suite of rules is just the beginning, with plans to expand in the near future, providing Microsoft Power Platform administrators even greater control over their environment groups.

By joining a group, an environment automatically follows all of the group’s rules. You don’t need to set it up manually. This makes sure that all environments in the group are aligned with the basic standards from the start. To ensure that each environment in an environment group maintains the configuration settings determined at the environment group level, the administrators of those single environments within the group will not be able to alter those settings and fall out of compliance with any configured rules.

Why is environment routing important?

Thanks to environment groups, these environments come preloaded with essential admin settings, including sharing limits and solution-checker, making adoption a breeze for Microsoft Power Platform admins. Previously, new makers had to figure out which environment to work in. With default environment routing, this decision happens automatically. Environment routing is a feature that automatically directs new makers to their personal developer environments instead of the default environment.

Personal developer environments are individual workspaces, similar to Microsoft OneDrive, where makers can confidently build apps and solutions using Microsoft Dataverse without worrying about others accessing their work, assets, and artifacts. Admins no longer need to be concerned about makers accidentally working in the default environment, where their work might conflict with others.

When combining with environment groups and rules, these environments come preconfigured with environment-level governance settings, including sharing limits and solution checker. This feature helps new makers to avoid confusion and conflicts when working in Microsoft Power Platform and helps admins to manage their environments more easily. Learn more about environment routing here.

Next steps
Environment groups and rules streamline management with efficient oversight over multiple environments using a centralized, consistent approach. This ensures uniform standards and configurations across all environments, significantly enhancing developer efficiency by providing ready-made, pre-configured environments that eliminate the need for manual setup. Consequently, this uniform governance simplifies administration and reduces overhead, leading to a more efficient development process. We’re excited to see how organizations continue to develop their Microsoft Power Platform adoption, build centers of excellence, and provide the tools needed for organizations to build modern, enterprise-scale solutions safely and securely.

We value your feedback and want to hear from you on what features and improvements you would like to see added to environment groups and rules. Throughout 2024, we’ll be enhancing environment groups based on user input. Stay tuned for exciting updates.

The post Announcing General Availability of environment groups and environment routing appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Power Platform admins always want to ensure that both current and new users of Microsoft Power Apps can access the resources they need to easily and productively use Power Platform. In the past, admins used welcome emails, made wikis, or established internal portals to assist makers with their learning journey and to help them have a good start.

With the maker welcome content feature, admins can easily customize the welcome content that Power Apps maker portal users see when they first sign in to stay updated on important messages, such as security policies, knowledge bases, the environment’s purpose, and support information that makers need to address their use cases and succeed.

To use this feature, Managed Environments must be enabled. The settings panel for Managed Environments gives you the ability to customize Markdown content and define a URL for the welcome content:

Once a welcome message is set up, makers will see a modal pop up in the maker portal when they enter an environment where this feature is enabled.

Makers can choose not to see this again, and will be able to access it on the Learn page at any time.
Any updates admins make to the content will override the “do not see this again” checkbox and show the updated modal to makers. Because of this behavior, admins can also use the maker welcome content as a “push notification” system. Organizations can use it to provide updated information on policies, prompts to fill out surveys, or information on popular apps. The possibilities are endless!

What’s next?

We are excited to expand the maker welcome content feature to cover the other products in the Power Platform family (e.g., Power Automate, Copilot Studio, and Power Pages). Keep an eye out for more news about this !

We’d like to hear from you
To learn more about the maker’s welcome content, see our documentation here. If you have any feedback to share, please visit our community forum. We’d love to hear how you’re using the maker welcome content!

The post Announcing General Availability of Power Apps maker welcome content appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

We are excited to announce the public preview of Default Environment Routing, a new Managed Environments feature that allows Power Platform admins to automatically direct new makers into their own personal developer environment when they visit make.powerapps.com for the first time. Default environment routing offers new makers a personal, safe space to build with Microsoft Dataverse, without the fear of others accessing their apps or data.

Default Environment Routing will allow admins to place their makers in a healthy Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) state from day one by directing them into their own personal developer environment instead of the default environment. With Power Platform pipelines, admins can also create a release pipeline from the created personal developer environment to production. This feature will help customers streamline their environment strategy and offer administrators more control over their makers.

For new makers up until now, the default environment serves as their home environment, which offers a seamless experience and accelerates innovation with the Power Platform. Establishing the same governance guardrails for all the makers in a single shared environment, however, gets more challenging as the maker base of any business grows. Administrators also have a challenge monitoring and managing all the assets in the default environment at scale.

Default Environment Routing is an essential tool for tenant administrators, providing them with the ability to manage their makers’ environment according to their specific governance requirements. This feature will help them to optimize their environment strategy, making it more efficient and secure for both makers and the organization. Admins can customize the governance rules and policies for each individual maker or business unit in their own developer environment as per their needs.

Prerequisites

Default environment routing is a tenant-level, admin setting that:

• Is enabled by Power Platform admins only.
• Requires that the Developer environment assignment setting is enabled for Everyone

• Requires the use of Managed Environment, since all of the newly created environments will be managed. Users in a managed developer environment will require premium licenses to run Power Platform assets.

Enable the Default environment routing setting

The Default environment routing setting is disabled by default and must be enabled using Power Platform admin center or PowerShell.

Enable the feature in Power Platform admin center

1. In the Power Platform admin center, in navigation pane, select Settings.
2. On the Tenant settings page, select Environment routing (preview).
3. In the Environment routing pane, turn on the Create personal developer environments for new makers option.

This feature enables the automatic creation of a personal, developer environment for all of your Power Apps new makers when they first launch make.powerapps.com. The definition of a new maker is limited to the makers who visit make.powerapps.com for the first time. Returning makers who have visited the site before aren’t impacted. The created developer environment will be managed by default and the new makers are assigned the admin role in their newly created developer environments.

IMPORTANT

• Any maker can build apps in the managed developer environments created through default environment routing without requiring a premium license. Nevertheless, since Managed Environments is not included as an entitlement in the Developer Plan, every user who runs assets in these environments will require a premium license. More information on the Managed environments and the Developer plan can be found here
• Non-managed Developer environments are unaffected by the above stated premium license requirements. You can learn more about the developer environment and developer plan here.

Looking forward

Our roadmap includes configuring user roles as well as the automatic configuration of Managed Environments and DLP settings for all new Development environments created through environment routing. Keep an eye out for our release notes where we announce Power Platform new features. We are committed to providing our customers with the best possible experience on the Power Platform, and we are excited to see how our customers will use Default Environment Routing to optimize their environment strategy. To learn more, please check out our updated documentation for the Default environment routing here

See related

Managed Environments Overview

Overview of pipelines in Power Platform

About the Power Apps Developer Plan

The post Streamline your governance and environment strategy using Default Environment Routing (preview) appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Solutions are used to transport apps and components from one environment to another or to apply a set of customizations to existing apps. A solution can contain one or more apps as well as other objects such as site maps, tables, processes, web resources, choices, flows, and more. A solution and its objects are stored in Microsoft Dataverse. Solutions are also the key mechanism for implementing application lifecycle management (ALM) in the Power Platform. For more information about solutions, see Solutions overview, and application lifecycle management (ALM) guide

Unlike model-driven apps and most other objects, makers can optionally create their canvas apps outside of a solution and outside Dataverse. This can lead to unhealthy ALM practices, and create an overhead for DevOps teams and admins as they try to automate their ALM process.

With this feature, environment admins will be able to set citizen makers and developers in a healthy ALM ready state from day one by enabling canvas apps as Dataverse solutions by default for one or more environments.

Enable canvas apps creation as Dataverse  solutions by default 

Canvas apps in solutions by default feature is disabled by default. However, environment admins can enable this feature by going to environment advanced settings, Product Settings, and toggle the feature “Create new canvas apps in Dataverse by default”  to “On” to enable the feature.

Default behavior

By default, this feature saves all canvas apps to the default solution named Common Data Services  (CDS) Default Solution published by Microsoft Dataverse Default Publisher (see below). As a best practice, we recommend that makers create their canvas apps in custom solutions or move canvas apps created from the default solution to a custom solution to facilitate the management of solutions and establish a common standard across all environments.

As always, we would love to hear from you on how we could keep improving this feature. Please leave your feedback and comments on this post so that we can keep track of your comments and requests.

For more information about adding canvas apps in solution by default, see Add canvas apps to solution by default (preview).

See related:

Manage feature settings in a Power Platform environment
Implement healthy solution ALM with canvas apps in solution by default

The post Creating canvas apps as Dataverse solutions by default (preview) appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Since its early announcement back in October, 2019, Monitor has helped thousands of citizen and professional developers to efficiently troubleshoot and more rapidly solve issues they come across while building their Power Apps and solutions.

Monitor is a tool that offers makers a true low-code approach through a rich troubleshooting experience that does not require any complicated setup such as plug-in installations, or configuration settings. Through a one click experience, Monitor enables makers to start viewing a stream of events from a user’s session to diagnose and troubleshoot app behavior during development in Power Apps or to monitor published apps during runtime.

Monitor can help you diagnose and troubleshoot problems faster and build more reliable apps. It provides a deep view into how an app runs by providing a log of all the key events during app authoring and run. Monitor tool also provides a better understanding of how the events and formulas contained in your app work so you can improve performance and identify any errors or problems.

Now, we are excited to announce this tool is generally available (GA). We have introduced a new collaborative troubleshooting capability “Connect User” in Monitor to better facilitate team collaboration and troubleshooting.

This feature has started rolling out and is available in all commercial and government clouds today. Let us look at the new capabilities for Monitor.

Collaborative troubleshooting using Monitor

Monitor tool offers two features to facilitate collaborative troubleshooting and debugging of Power Apps’ problems. The first feature “Invite”, enables makers to share a monitoring session by inviting other members within the same organization to the same monitor session. For example, a maker troubleshooting a performance problem with Power Apps, can invite a member from the technical support team to concurrently view all the flowing events through the same troubleshooting monitor session. The second feature “Connect user”, enables makers and support teams to share a link with end users to launch a published app and connect it to a monitor session so that support teams can watch the sequence of events generated by end users’ interaction.

Invite user

Makers can share real-time monitor session with others, such as a support technician, to help investigate problems. Inviting other users to your Monitor session enables you to quickly collaborate and debug an app together, without the need to share your screen. When you invite others to participate in a session, they see the exact same app events in their own browser, without having to open the app or the need to reproduce the specific scenario that you’re debugging. This allows you and other participants to browse, view, and inspect the app events independently without stepping on each other or handing control back-and-forth to identify the problem.

When using Invite user feature for a published app:

1. User A plays the published app from Power Apps.
2. User A invites User B to a monitor session.
3. User B joins the monitor session with the link User A sent.
4. User A interacts with the app.
5. User B watches the events generated from User A’s interaction with the app in their own Monitor window.

NOTE :You can invite any user in your organization to a Monitor session. Users joining the session will see all the events generated by the app, including any data.

Recipient users can use the link to open the Monitor and connect to your Monitor session.

Connect user (Only for published Canvas Apps)

Maker can enable an end-user to launch a published canvas app and connect using a monitoring session. This feature allows the maker to watch the sequence of events generated while interacting with the app, and help with problem investigation.

• The Connect user feature enable makers and support teams to share a link with end users to launch a published app and connect it to a monitor session so that, support teams can watch the sequence of events generated by end users’ interaction.

NOTE : Connect user requires the app with Power Apps version 3.20042 or later. For earlier versions, publish the app again for this option to be available.

When using Connect user feature for a canvas app:

1. User A choose the desired app to monitor and open monitor.
2. User A selects Connect user and share the generated connect link with User B
3. User B plays the published canvas app by clicking the link shared by user A.
4. User A watches the monitored session as user B interacts with the app.

Monitor Grid Improvements

The ability to organize and filter the session events is an essential part of having a focused and effective troubleshooting session in Monitor. With the updated grid view, makers can now move columns left or right to change their order or pin a column by choosing the “Pin Left/Right” column menu option.

Additionally, the “Filter by” menu now offers multiple options based on the data type to enable makers to specify one or more filter condition to easily spot or search for specific event types and keywords.

As always, we would love to hear from you on how we could keep improving Monitor. Please leave your feedback and comments on this post so that we can keep track of your comments and requests.

You can learn more about Monitor here

The post Announcing the General Availability (GA) of Monitor in Power Apps appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.