Manage the Microsoft Power Platform environment
Environments are the unit of governance
An environment is a container for apps, flows, Dataverse data, and users, with its own security boundary and its own DLP policy assignment. Every tenant has a default environment that all licensed users can access; it cannot be deleted, so production work should live in dedicated environments instead. The common pattern is Dev → Test → Production, with solutions as the transport mechanism.
Concepts to name
- Solutions: containers of components (apps, flows, tables). Unmanaged solutions are used for development and stay editable; managed solutions are locked and deployed downstream. A publisher supplies a prefix that prevents naming collisions.
- Security: Dataverse uses business units, security roles, teams, and column-level security. App sharing is separate from data security - sharing an app does not grant table access.
- DLP policies: classify connectors as Business, Non-Business, or Blocked, applied at tenant or environment level.
- Admin center: manage environments, capacity, and policies. The Center of Excellence toolkit adds inventory, compliance, and app-usage analytics.
Traps
- You cannot delete the default environment.
- Managed solutions cannot be edited directly in the target environment; change them in Dev and re-export.
- Deleting a solution may not remove components that belong to another solution (solution layering).
- Sharing an app is not the same as granting data access.
Rule of thumb
Promote with solutions, protect with environments and security roles, police connectors with DLP. If a question asks how to move work to production, the answer is export/import a managed solution - not 'rebuild it by hand'.