Design and manage business solutions
The Design and manage business solutions domain tests planning before building: environments, solutions, the Dataverse data model, security, and governance. Most marks come from choosing the right container and the right security boundary rather than from formulas.
Environments and solution lifecycle
A tenant usually separates development, test, and production environments. Build in an unmanaged solution in development, export it as managed, and import it into test and production; a managed solution cannot be edited in the target environment, so changes ship as a new version from development. Create the publisher before adding components - its prefix (for example new_) becomes part of every schema name and cannot be changed later. Connection references and environment variables keep environment-specific values such as site URLs and connections out of the package, so the same managed solution deploys everywhere.
Data model and security
Dataverse security is role-based. Security roles grant privileges (Create, Read, Write, Delete, Append, Append To, Share) at a depth of User, Business Unit, Parent: Child Business Units, or Organization. Business units form the ownership hierarchy, teams can own records and hold roles, and column security profiles protect individual fields.
Governance
Data loss prevention policies classify connectors as Business, Non-Business, or Blocked; an app or flow cannot mix connectors from the Business and Non-Business groups.
Worked example
An expense app in Development uses SharePoint plus Dataverse. Exporting it unmanaged and importing to Production is wrong twice over: the managed layer should be read-only there, and a hard-coded SharePoint URL would still point to the dev site. Correct design: create the publisher first, add a SharePoint connection reference and a SiteUrl environment variable, export as managed, then set the variable and rebind the connection during import.
Traps
- Importing an unmanaged solution into production.
- Editing a managed solution in the target environment.
- Changing the publisher prefix after components exist.
- Mixing Business and Non-Business connectors under one DLP policy.