Plan and prepare for Microsoft Power Platform governance and administration in 2024 release wave 2

Overview

Power Platform and Dynamics 365 provide intuitive, yet powerful governance tools for enterprise management of low-code and enterprise-critical assets. These tools include robust security, comprehensive compliance, and straightforward administrative features for top-level protection and proactive governance. They integrate smoothly with other Microsoft solutions. The Power Platform admin center enhances license and capacity oversight. It offers insights and helpful suggestions to improve resource use and cost-effectiveness. It also brings a new dimension to customer support with intuitive, self-service resources, real-time service health updates, and streamlined ticket handling. Application lifecycle management (ALM) becomes more transparent across the organization. IT can easily certify widely used assets in a scalable, uncomplicated manner. Together, these new enhancements streamline the adoption of the highly anticipated Microsoft Copilot features. They allow IT departments to safely expand low-code usage within the enterprise and establish Power Platform as the premier choice for modernizing and developing enterprise solutions.

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

• Enhancements to the admin center experience. We organize functionalities in themes around governance tasks for a more streamlined experience. We add an enhanced focus on Copilot adoption and security.
• Upgrades to pipelines and new ALM features. These features help enterprises deploy and operate mission-critical assets on the platform more effectively.
• Advanced routing mechanisms that direct users to the right environments. These mechanisms reduce dependence on the widely shared default environment and introduce a simpler environment strategy that simplifies governance at scale.

Updates to Governance and administration 2024 release wave 2

Investment areas

Application lifecycle management
IT administrators can use Power Platform's cohesive features to deploy solutions, manage versions, and orchestrate environments. These features play a crucial role in deployment and application lifecycle management. The platform encourages team collaboration, provides a simplified experience for solution discovery and development, and supports a feedback loop for continuous improvement.

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.

Monitoring operational health
To help IT administrators govern Power Platform and Dynamics 365 at scale, the platform provides a wide range of insights. These insights include usage statistics, resource inventory, audit logs, performance data, reliability data, and other important signals. To support strong monitoring and issue resolution, IT administrators can use built-in reports and export data to other data sources. With these capabilities, IT administrators can proactively understand and improve operational health, make sure all assets perform optimally, and align with business productivity goals.

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.