Plan and prepare for Microsoft Power Platform governance and administration in 2024 release wave 1

Overview

Microsoft Power Platform offers a range of governance and administration capabilities that span Power Platform and Dynamics 365 applications. These capabilities help administrators and IT professionals set up, secure, manage, govern, and monitor the use and adoption of Power Platform and its low-code assets across the enterprise.

Power Platform offers several administration experiences, including:

• Power Platform admin center is the central place to manage the platform. Beyond the standard capabilities that help manage personal productivity, Power Platform admin center offers a set of advanced governance capabilities that give you more visibility and more controls over makers and assets that are hosted in managed environments.

• Rich tools such as PowerShell cmdlets and the new admin connector, built on top of the unified API surface, help administrators automate the management of the low-code assets.

In this wave, we’re adding new governance capabilities that help you manage Power Platform more easily at scale. Key investments for this wave include:

• A new environment that groups elements you can manage easily with rules.
• A new advisor and a set of admin recommendations that help admins with posture management.
• New security features that include controls for network layer security, the ability to integrate with managed identities, and enhanced integrations with Microsoft Purview and Sentinel.

Updates to governance and administration 2024 release wave 1

Investment areas

Enterprise scale administration
To manage large volumes of Power Platform and Dynamics 365 assets, IT administrators use a suite of tools that boost efficiency and precision. This approach streamlines environment management, supports systematic bulk governance, and provides built-in recommendations based on best practices to keep the operational framework optimized, secure, and compliant. With a unified interface enhanced by advanced automation tools like API, PowerShell, Microsoft Power Platform CLI, or connectors, administrators can fully automate tasks. This automation makes it easy to handle and maintain extensive assets across the infrastructure.

Licensing and capacity
As an IT administrator, you get detailed and transparent views of license and capacity usage. These views include clear monitoring and comprehensive insights. You see Dynamics 365 and Power Platform licenses, their benefits, and how effectively users use them. Detailed reports on license usage, easy navigation, and AI-powered analytics help you make informed decisions about resource allocation, policy settings, and cost-saving strategies. With tools for granular control and proactive management of licenses, you can step in at the right time to prevent overuse. You can streamline license and capacity management across different business units and keep utilization optimized.

Security and compliance
This feature area includes enterprise-grade protection for all Power Platform assets. Use the admin tools to manage the security of Power Platform and Dynamics 365 at scale. Protect data with secure guardrails. Safeguard the entire deployment with integrated solutions. Interoperability with Microsoft solutions heightens your security posture. Continuous governance helps you meet up-to-date regulations. Proactive measures and policies guide makers in secure development. Security by default, scaled visibility, and comprehensive auditing capabilities enhance the platform's security measures. These features ensure end-to-end visibility and compliance.

Unified experience for Power Platform and finance and operations apps
As part of unifying the admin experiences for finance and operations apps within Power Platform, the environment for finance and operations apps is now an application within Power Platform. You can install and host multiple Dynamics 365 applications, such as Sales, Marketing, finance and operations apps, flows, and websites in Power Platform in the same Power Platform environment with a Dataverse database. This unification gives admins a consistent and single set of lifecycle operations they can perform across all artifacts.

The unified admin experience brings together user, administrative, and developer experiences for Power Platform and finance and operations apps. This experience provides complete, end-to-end business application experiences for users who use these apps, and for admins and developers who maintain and customize the apps.

To learn more about the entire set of capabilities being delivered during this release wave, check out the release plan for Microsoft Power Platform governance and administration below:

For application administrators

User-impacting features to the user experience enabled automatically
User-impacting features should be reviewed by application administrators. This facilitates release change management and enables successful onboarding of new capabilities released to market. For the complete list, look for all features tagged "Users, automatically" in the release plan.

Features that must be enabled by application administrators
This release wave contains features that must be enabled or configured by administrators, makers, or business analysts to be available for their users. For the complete list, look for all features tagged "Users by admins, makers, or analysts" in the release plan.