Plan and prepare for governance and administration in 2024 release wave 2

Overview

Power Platform and Dynamics 365 provide intuitive, yet powerful governance tools for enterprise-level management of low code and enterprise, critical assets. These tools include robust security, comprehensive compliance, and straightforward administrative features that ensure top-tier protection and proactive governance, along with seamless integration with other Microsoft solutions. The Power Platform admin center enhances license and capacity oversight, offering 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, enabling IT to easily certify widely-used assets in a scalable, uncomplicated manner. Collectively, the new enhancements streamline the adoption of the highly anticipated Microsoft Copilot features, allowing 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're adding new governance capabilities that allow customers to manage Power Platform more easily at scale. Key investments for this wave include:

• Enhancements to the admin center experience, which includes organizing functionalities in themes around governance tasks for a more streamlined experience and enhanced focus on Copilot adoption and security.
• Upgrades to pipelines and the introduction of new ALM features that are designed to assist enterprises in deploying and operating mission-critical assets on the platform more effectively.
• Advanced routing mechanisms to steer users to the right environments, decreasing dependence on the widely shared, default environment and introducing a simpler environment strategy that simplifies the governance at scale.

Updates to Governance and administration 2024 release wave 2

Investment areas

Application lifecycle management
IT administrators can leverage Power Platform's cohesive features for deploying solutions, managing versions, and orchestrating environments which are crucial for successful deployment and application lifecycle management. The platform promotes team collaboration, offers a simplified experience for solution discovery and development, and facilitates a feedback loop for continuous improvement.

Enterprise scale administration
IT administrators can use a suite of tools to manage high volumes of Power Platform and Dynamics 365 assets with heightened efficiency and precision. The approach streamlines environment management, supports systematic bulk governance, and delivers built-in, best practice recommendations to ensure an optimized, secure, and compliant operational framework. With a unified interface bolstered by advanced automation tools, such as API, PowerShell, Microsoft Power Platform CLI, or connectors, administrators are equipped to fully automate tasks, enabling efficient manipulation and maintenance of extensive assets across the infrastructure.

Licensing and capacity
IT administrators can take advantage of detailed and transparent views of license and capacity usage, complete with clear monitoring and comprehensive insights. This includes visibility into Dynamics 365 and Power Platform licenses, their benefits, and usage effectiveness. Detailed reporting on license usage, easy navigation, and AI-powered analytics enable informed decisions on resource allocation, policy setting, and cost-saving strategies. With capabilities for granular control and proactive management of licenses, administrators are provided with the necessary tools to intervene just at the right moment to prevent overuse. They are equipped to streamline license and capacity management across various business units, ensuring optimized utilization.

Monitoring operational health
IT administrators have access to a wide array of insights for effective governance at scale across Power Platform and Dynamics 365. These insights encompass usage statistics, resource inventory, audit logs, performance, reliability and other vital signals. To facilitate robust monitoring and issue resolution, IT administrators have access to out-of-box reports alongside options to export data to alternate data sources. These capabilities empower IT administrators to proactively understand and improve operational health, ensuring all assets are performing optimally and aligning with business productivity goals.

Security and compliance
This feature area includes enterprise-grade protection for all Power Platform assets with admin tools for managing the security of Power Platform and Dynamics 365 at scale. It enables data protection with secure guardrails and allows for the safeguarding of the entire deployment with integrated solutions. Interoperability with Microsoft solutions heighten security posture, while continuous governance tailors to 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, ensuring end-to-end visibility and compliance.

Unified experience for Power Platform and finance and operations apps
As part of the unification of admin experiences of finance and operations apps within Power Platform, the environment for finance and operations apps is now an application within Power Platform. Therefore, multiple Dynamics 365 applications, such as Sales, Marketing, finance and operations, and apps, flows, and websites in Power Platform can be installed and hosted in the same Power Platform environment with a Dataverse database. This unification provides a consistent and single set of lifecycle operations that an admin can perform across all artifacts.

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

To learn more about the entire set of capabilities being delivered during this release wave, check out the release plan for 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.