Plan and prepare for Microsoft Power Platform governance and administration in 2025 release wave 1

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:

• Enhanced admin center experience, such as organizing functions and tasks for a more streamlined experience with a greater focus on Copilot adoption and security.
• Enhanced tenant-wide inventory view and simplified environment strategy to govern Power Platform tenants more efficiently and at scale.
• Upgrades to resource monitoring and pipelines to help enterprises deploy and operate mission critical assets on the platform more effectively.
• Upgrades to the admin connector to automate admin tasks.

Updates to Governance and administration 2025 release wave 1

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.

Copilot governance
IT administrators have comprehensive governance capabilities for all Copilot features across Power Platform and Dynamics 365. This governance includes policies that set Copilot access and behavior to address security concerns and regulatory compliance requirements. Administrators also get data-driven insights to help them evaluate Copilot's impact, return on investment (ROI), and compliance status in the organization.

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.

Help and support
Without opening support requests, IT administrators can find self-help solutions, track relevant known issues, and view service health status. These enhancements provide a smooth and integrated way to manage support engagement and better understand the impact of new features or bug fixes. With these tools and information, IT administrators can quickly and efficiently address service issues. They ensure system reliability while enabling the full potential of Power Platform and Dynamics 365.

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.