​Delegated deployments run pipelines as service principals, or as the pipeline owner (including service accounts).​ This ensures developers of any skill level can request deployments without needing elevated (or any) permissions in target environments. For security reasons, approvals are required – whether automated or manual. This is simple and highly capable with Power Automate Approvals and Copilot powered deployment notes providing pertinent information about the deployment request.​

Delegated deployments has been the top requested pipelines feature since we launched pipelines preview last December. But it’s not about blocking developers, or inhibiting the ROI realized from enabling citizen development with the Power Platform. Rather, it’s about empowering citizen development at scale without sacrificing security or auditability.

We’ve also introduced another pipelines extension with this update. Now you can run custom validation logic before solutions are exported from development environments. Combined, pipelines now offers three gated extensions, opening the in-product deployment capabilities to a wide range of use cases. Similarly, pipelines can be customized with low-code, no-code, and/or pro-code.

We’d love your feedback and look forward to more customers empowering citizen developers while also protecting their production assets.

Learn more

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The post Announcing pipelines delegated deployments (SPN) 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.

We’ve put together a simple solution (Power Platform Administration Planning) that is designed to help you better:

• Plan your team structure
• Review where you spend time and look for automation or innovation opportunities

The solution is built on Microsoft Dataverse and is a new stand-alone component in the CoE Starter Kit. Admin tasks are defined in a model-driven app and insights are provided in a Power BI dashboard.

You can start either by adding your own tasks or by importing a set of example tasks from an Excel spreadsheet, populated with some of the most common administration tasks covering:

• AI Builder
• Environments and connectors
• Power Apps
• Power Automate
• Power Pages
• Power Virtual Agents

You’ll need to review the tasks and populate task metadata to get the best out of the Power BI dashboard.

Plan your team structure

If you’re getting started, you might find importing the sample tasks spreadsheet a great starting point for inspiration. Where possible, we added in the most common administrative tasks that administrators perform and supplied links to supporting/ instructional documentation.

Task metadata is used by the dashboard to provide useful information about your team structure and the level of expertise required to complete your administrative work.

Review where you spend time

You may already be administrating the platform and looking for ways to increase your maturity, looking for automation or innovation opportunities.

When you add your own estimation of which tasks you need, how much time you’ll spend doing them, and who will do them, the dashboard will indicate if the size of your team is sufficient, roles and experience levels and an estimate of how much time to expect to spend administering the platform. After your team has been doing the work for a while, you can update with the exact data.

Admin tasks in the model driven app

Tasks can be imported from the sample spreadsheet or manually created.

Tasks have the following schema:

Power BI dashboard

The structure of the dashboard is designed to help you focus on what you do, how reactive your team is, and the impact that automation and outsourcing (if your organization does) has on your overall efficiency.

Team, outsourcing and automation

Team, outsourcing and automation aggregates administrative task data, indicating:

Team workload – enter the number of staff in your team. Based on aggregated effort, the required hours (per team member) to complete the tasks are estimated.

Outsourcing – what, if any, impact outsourcing is having on your workload. How many resources, and what level of expertise is required.

Automation – This section provides insights into how much time you’re saving by automating tasks and the expertise that would be required.

Task breakdown – proactive & reactive balance

Task breakdown – proactive & reactive balance helps focus on the balance between tasks that are ad-hoc, or reactive. By displaying the percentage of tasks that have been categorised as ad-hoc, and providing a filtered list, it encourages you to look for automation, outsourcing or innovation opportunities.

Team breakdown – experience & personas

Task breakdown – experience & personas aggregates the duration for all tasks by frequency and provides insight on:

Experience levels required – illustrates the experience required across all tasks. This can be useful in estimating training requirements for your existing team

Insight for each ‘core admin persona’ & ‘peripheral persona’ – is useful to understand how many of your tasks rely on additional teams to complete. For example: creating an environment may also require Azure AD Security groups to be created for managing access.

Task overview: experience, persona & categorization

Administrative tasks are categorized, which is useful in understanding where your team spends the most time. Tasks have two categories to provide deeper insight. For example: selecting ‘Reporting’ will not only filter the list of administrative tasks to display tasks categorized with reporting, it will also display tasks by their secondary category. Especially useful to understand what type of reporting your team is focusing on, and how much time they are spending completing this.

Where you can get it

Microsoft Power Platform Administration Planning is a standalone module in the CoE (Center of Excellence) Starter kit, which means it’s open sourced and available for download from the same GitHub repository as the toolkit is. Setup guidance and further information is available.

Watch the Power CAT Live! video where we go into more detail about this solution:

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