Maker Deployment page

Makers can now view all their deployments in one place, regardless of solution or pipeline. If their deployment began from (or was deployed to) the current environment, they will be able to view the run history status of it. Failed Deployments and Active Deployments are highlighted in a convenient overview, so you don’t have to go looking for them either!

In addition to deployment visibility, we’ve included a Get started section that will evolve over time. For now, it will link to documentation to help a maker begin their journey to healthy application lifecycle management (ALM).

To further improve understanding of what healthy ALM looks like, we’ll soon be adding recommendations, where makers are alerted to resolve any potentially unhealthy ALM-related behavior, such as housing high-use apps outside of a solution.

Admin Deployment page

The Deployment page in the new admin center provides a streamlined experience to help administrators learn about, setup, and operation best-in-class ALM. The initial preview provides a central location to view all deployments in the tenant, approve deployment requests, and troubleshoot failures.

Select a pipelines host from the picker to see all the pipelines and deployment history managed with that host. A dedicated Failed deployments view helps admins quickly identify and troubleshoot failures and trending issues.

Admins can approve or reject deployment requests assigned to them. First setup Delegated deployments with service principals as the recommended way to deploy securely.

It is important that admins review changes in the solution and the sharing request. With the help of Copilot-generated deployment notes visible in the request, this becomes easier, but if you want a more granular look, be sure to set up Source control integration and link the repository to the approval.

Managed Operations

The Deployment pages are an offering of Managed Operations, allowing all who make or administrate to gain further insight into their Application Lifecycle Management to ensure that business solutions are reliable and performant in production. Aside from just deployment pipelines, these maker and admin experiences will evolve over the coming months and include many more Managed Operations intersections to take advantage of. So, stay tuned for more updates and please leave your feedback below!

Learn more

Admin Deployment page

Maker Deployment page

Managed Operations

New Power Platform Admin Center

The post Introducing Maker and Admin Deployment Pages appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

It just takes a few seconds to connect your Dataverse environment to Git. You can connect and use Git integration within Power Apps, Microsoft Copilot Studio, Power Automate, and Power Pages. You’ll also need access to an Azure DevOps Git repository.

Rollout is in-progress. Git integration is currently available in public geos outside the US. Your environment must be enabled for early access and accessed at https://make.preview.powerapps.com.

As the team develops, Dataverse tracks everyone’s changes. When ready, commit your changes to a branch in the connected Azure DevOps Git repository. A commit link is provided to view the changes within the repository and compare diffs. You’ll notice solutions and solution objects are now stored in human readable formats in the repo.

Professional developers can work in source control while others work in one or more environments. It’s easy to pull others’ changes into other development environments which are connected to the same source code location. This allows team members to build without others editing in their environment and share changes once they’re ready. Connect multiple development environments using the same repo, branch, and folder. Then, in each environment create or import an unmanaged solution with the same name and publisher.

When committing and pulling changes, conflicts may be detected – meaning someone else made conflicting changes to the same object. You’ll need to choose whether to keep the version that’s in your environment or bring the version from source control into your environment. You can also revert changes in the repository, then pull the prior version into your environment.

When the team is ready to deploy to test or production, you can use Pipelines in Power Platform for the release. Building and deploying using developer tools isn’t available yet for this new format.

We hope you enjoy the preview. There are many current limitations and you shouldn’t use this feature in environments or Git folders where you’re developing production solutions. Please leave your feedback below, in the community forums, on social media, or another outlet of choice. We look forward to hearing what you’d like to see prioritized next.

Learn more

Overview of Power Platform Git integration

Setup Git integration

The post Introducing Git Integration in Power Platform (preview) appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

This feature will ensure that solution deployments are predictable and consistent and enforces that all changes to production environments go through ALM processes. With this feature, the system administrators will be able to block unmanaged customizations by not allowing direct changes in the environment and by not allowing import of unmanaged solutions in Microsoft Dataverse environments. Unmanaged customizations become the top layer, which blocks managed solutions from being effective. These direct changes in the environment bypass formal ALM processes like testing and approvals.

This feature can be enabled or disabled from the Features area of the environment settings page in the Power Platform admin center. By default, this setting is disabled. The feature cannot be enabled in the default environment. Before enabling the feature, please review the known limitations as some application experiences may be limited.

Once the setting is enabled these restrictions will be imposed for the environment:

• Import of unmanaged solutions into the environment are blocked.
• Creation of new solution objects like apps, tables, and forms are blocked.
• Customizing existing solution objects are blocked.
• Any attempt to make unmanaged customizations will result in an error returned to the user, such as: “This environment doesn’t allow unmanaged customizations. This was a choice made by your admin, and certain actions won’t be available or will be view only.”

The following operations are not blocked by this feature:

• Change of environment variable values.
• Enabling or disabling of solution objects. For example, turning Power Automate flows on or off.
• Assigning of ownership or sharing of table records.
• Solutions operations like remove active customizations.
• Creation and export of unmanaged solutions.

Learn more

• Block unmanaged customizations: Block unmanaged customizations
• Solution layers and unmanaged customizations here: Solution layers
• Blog post from public preview: Announcing preview for blocking unmanaged customizations | Microsoft Power Apps

The post Announcing General Availability of Block unmanaged customizations appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

What’s new?

With the latest updates, makers and admins have more control over the structure and usage of personal pipelines, allowing them to customize them to their needs.

Add a stage to your single-stage pipeline

Pipeline owners can append an additional stage to their personal pipelines, enabling them to create a lightweight dev->test->prod 2-stage pipeline if applicable.

Reuse your pipeline in a different development environment

Lightweight pipeline creators can use a pipeline they’ve already made, even if the current environment isn’t linked to the pipeline yet. Then, when the maker deploys, the environment will be linked as a source.

Admins can use Force Link to move environments from one pipelines host to another and instantly resolve cross-host environment association errors

As part of the “environment is already associated with another host” error, there is now a Force Link action available for admins to delink an environment from a current pipelines host and link it to the one they want to govern ALM in.

In addition to these new capabilities, we have also enabled redeploying previous solution versions by default for newly created pipelines. This setting can still be managed by admins in the Deployment Pipeline Configuration app via Manage pipelines.

Easy ALM for Makers

Pipelines for All is a jumpstart to healthy ALM with no extra privileges required, no conflicts with existing environments associated with pre-configured custom pipelines hosts, and, most importantly, no hassle to deploy your solutions.

When deploying, target environments must be enabled as Managed Environments.

Admins still have control

Personal pipelines rely on makers’ import-access to target environments. Admins can directly control what environments makers have import-access to by either creating custom security roles or customizing current privileges. We are also working on other governance features that will scale the management of personal pipelines as well as bulk environment association to a custom host. In custom hosts, unlike within the platform host, pipeline creation can be further restricted and pipelines can be as advanced as you are willing to make them using our various extensibility points.

ALM isn’t a one-size-fits-all space, and we have designed Pipelines with that core principle at the forefront. Pipelines is a solution that has the power to work for everyone, and we are just as excited as you are with each new update we make.

Learn more about pipelines

• Set up pipelines in Power Platform. Microsoft docs

The post Pipelines for All are now Generally Available (GA) appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

With these updates, we’re excited to announce the general availability of delegated deployments for pipelines in Power Platform!

Additionally, admins can now enable pipelines for multi-geo support, making it easy to centrally administer global deployments within a single management plane.

Build

As makers develop, customizations are automatically saved to their preferred solution (no need to understand or navigate to solutions). This avoids downstream deployment issues, painful debugging steps, and other common mishaps.

 When authoring solution cloud flows, drafts and versioning provides a history for each published version of the flow. Makers can view the version history, restore prior versions, and save draft changes without publishing them live – even if the flow has errors! Then, the flow can be published when they are ready to run the flow. Please leave your drafts and versioning comments and feedback here.

Test

Admins can improve quality by ensuring solution checker runs on every deployment, and configure issue tolerance levels for different environments. Pipelines can be extended to run additional code and security scanning tools, or automated tests by integrating your source control systems. Functional user acceptance testing is also recommended after deployment to test environments.

We recommend starting with pipelines in Power Platform and using extensions if you need to integrate more advanced workloads running in Azure DevOps, GitHub, etc. Similarly, if taking dependencies on test automation, we recommend Test Engine.

Release

Makers are guided to deploy at the right time. For example, when manually exporting and importing solutions or blocked by sharing limits.

Instead, sharing is requested during deployment to target environments, like production, where it’s appropriate to share broadly. Admins simply need to approve the combined deployment and sharing request, and the rest happens automatically. Sharing is rolling out for canvas apps and soon for cloud flows and security roles.

Makers can also update existing environment variables and connection references in pipelines and solution import. Combined, these capabilities protect production assets with least privileged access, reduce admin burden, and train makers to submit all updates via your organization’s change management process. If admins haven’t configured pipelines and governance policies, makers are empowered to create their own pipeline to environments (they must already have access to manually import solutions. Pipelines doesn’t escalate permissions). Admins can apply additional governance controls and manage security within the default host and custom hosts. There’s a new entry point within the solution experience to Manage pipelines and a Security Teams section in the app to manage pipelines access. Note: we currently recommend using a custom pipelines host when more advanced control is desired.

 

Why pipelines vs manual export/import? Unlike manual export/import, pipelines stores backups for every version of every solution deployed, and admin accessible audit logs describing who, what, when, where, and why (AI provided). Pipelines deployments enjoy higher success rates by pre-validating solutions against target environments and sequencing multiple deployments to avoid conflicts. 

 

Solution simplification remains an ongoing effort. Recent improvements include streamlined dependency management and automatic conversion of unmanaged to managed solution objects (see moving from unmanaged to managed solutions).

 

What if breaking changes are inadvertently deployed? Now makers and admins can now re-deploy prior solution versions using pipelines or developer tooling.

 

Documentation

• ALM Guide
• Pipelines in Power Platform
• Managed environments
• Power Platform Developer tools
   

The post April 2024 ALM blog: What’s new and what it means for you appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

• Open and inspect the object.
• Delete the object.
• Remove dependency between the objects.
• Open documentation to learn more about the dependencies for that object type.
• Delete the solution taking dependency on the solution object.

The post Working with solution dependencies for objects made easier appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Makers can now initiate a redeployment from a successful deployment record via the Run history tab on the Pipelines page. Pipeline owners will have the authority to control this feature’s enablement as well, so no worries about someone rolling back without permission. In pipeline settings, there is a new configuration option, Allow redeployment of older versions, which can be controlled by the pipeline owner(s). In addition to the setting, there is a confirmation message before deployment configuration and a warning message at the end of the configuration on the summary page specifying that the action is irreversible, so that there is guaranteed intent to overwrite the current solution version with the older one.

We hope that this simple, yet monumental feature will better assist customers in enabling best ALM practices seamlessly for their organizations, and remove the hassle of restoring previous versions of solutions in target environments.

Learn more about pipelines

Redeploy past solution versions. Microsoft docs

Overview of pipelines in Power Platform. Microsoft docs

The post Redeploy past solution versions using pipelines appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

This feature is now available in make.preview.powerapps.com for you to try out, and will be available for everyone in make.powerapps.com by the end of the week.

How does this work?

Thanks to a newly integrated pipelines host available to be provisioned in the platform itself, Pipelines can be set up as soon as you get to the Pipelines page. From the new experience, makers can now create pipelines in environments that are not already associated with a custom host (i.e. environments that are not already using pipelines). The Create pipeline experience enables makers to name their personal pipeline and select a target environment, enabled as a Managed Environment, that they have import access to. From clicking Save, the lightweight pipeline is created, and they are ready to leverage the benefits of pipelines like no .zip file downloads or uploads required, deployment scheduling, inline target environment solution validation, upfront environment variable value validation, recorded deployment stage run history, and Copilot-generated deployment notes.

Who benefits? And what about admins?

Makers who are currently manually exporting their solutions from their development environments and importing to a test or production environment can now instantly benefit from pipelines if they have Managed Environments enabled for their target environment(s). And, when an admin is ready to set up pipelines the traditional way and enable extensibility such as approvals, they still can. The process of going from efficient personal pipelines to a central governed pipeline will also be made easy by the end of next month when this feature becomes Generally Available.

We hope this will make it much easier to get started with Pipelines and enable all makers to adopt healthy ALM practices.

Learn more about Pipelines for All

• Set up pipelines in Power Platform. Microsoft docs

The post Pipelines for All Public Preview: Easily set up pipelines in Power Platform appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

As we have now moved to GA, Preferred Solution is turned on by default. The admin experience, to turn off preferred solution during public preview, is no longer needed as we are now generally available. If you do not set a custom solution as a preferred solution, the CDS default solution or Default solution will be used as a preferred solution. You can always set your preferred solution.
Additionally, be mindful of any existing limitations in the preferred solution mentioned here as we work towards resolving them.
Related Links:

1. Set a preferred solution – Power Apps | Microsoft Learn

The post Preferred solution is now Generally Available appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

The feature Block unmanaged customizations (Preview) can be enabled or disabled from the Features area of the environment settings for environments in the Power Platform admin center. By default, this setting is disabled.

Once the setting is enabled these restrictions will be imposed for the environment:

• Import of unmanaged solutions into the environment are blocked.
• Creation of new solution objects like apps, tables, and forms are blocked.
• Customizing existing solution objects are blocked.
• Any unmanaged customizations changes result in an error returned to the user, such as: “This environment doesn’t allow unmanaged customizations. This was a choice made by your admin, and certain actions won’t be available or will be view only.”

The following operations are not blocked by this feature:

• Change of environment variable values.
• Enabling or disabling of solution objects. For example, turning Power Automate flows on or off.
• Assigning of ownership or sharing of table records.
• Solutions operations like remove active customizations.
• Creation and export of unmanaged solutions.

The feature cannot be enabled in the default environment.

Learn more about Block unmanaged customizations here: Block unmanaged customizations

Learn more about Solution layers and unmanaged customizations here: Solution layers

The post Announcing preview for blocking unmanaged customizations appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.