Microsoft Power Platform Center of Excellence (CoE) Starter Kit

Users and organisations can use Microsoft Power Platform to analyse, act upon, and automate data to digitally transform their operations. Power BI, Power Apps, Power Pages, Power Automate, Microsoft Copilot Studio, and AI Builder are currently included in the Microsoft Power Platform.

Power Apps transforms the process of developing software solutions by allowing designers to submit a business challenge and a group of agents to assist them in creating Power Platform software. The most common tasks, such as exploring, entering, and summarising data, are supported by a set of extensible agents that give Power Apps its intelligence. By building agents from pre-existing apps and deploying them to handle work independently, makers can automate routine tasks. Power Apps is speeding up the transition to intelligent AI-powered applications at scale by integrating the capacity for users to comprehend and track agent behaviours, as well as the ability to quickly address problems when agents encounter obstacles. Power BI helps you transform the business data into visualisations for the easy analysis and understanding. Power Pages, a component of Microsoft Power Platform, makes it simple for companies to create safe, data-driven portals. Web agents for multi-platform engagement (email, Teams, WhatsApp), AI-assisted form filling for increased productivity, dynamic list visualisations for better insights, and improved governance policies to fortify security and expedite site deployments are just a few of the recent updates that incorporate AI-powered features. With AI-native features like generative actions and sophisticated document processing, as well as innovative human-in-loop experiences like improved approvals, Power Automate is revolutionising how businesses automate intricate business processes. Get a full array of governance, observability, and security controls coming to Automation Centre and Power Platform Admin Centre to manage intricate automations at scale.

COE Kit:

In addition to providing standards, consistency, and governance to the organisation, a Centre of Excellence (CoE) fosters innovation and improvement and unites individuals with similar business objectives to exchange success stories and information.  With an emphasis on Power Apps, Power Automate, and Microsoft Copilot Studio, the Microsoft Power Platform CoE Starter Kit is a set of parts and resources intended to assist you in beginning to create a plan for implementing and maintaining Microsoft Power Platform.

Investing in and fostering organic growth while upholding governance and control is what it means to establish a Microsoft Power Platform Centre of Excellence (CoE). As a key function, a CoE can dismantle organisational and geographic silos and promote innovation and improvement. An organisation can effectively align around company objectives rather than departmental measurements by using a CoE. The purpose of establishing a CoE, your goals, and the main business objectives you want to attain are some important concepts to prioritise. After that, one can initiate, grow, and learn as you proceed. For many, encouraging more creativity and innovation within the company starts with the CoE. While preserving the required degree of central supervision and governance, the CoE can enable business units to digitise and automate their operations.

A set of parts and resources called the Power Platform CoE Starter Kit is intended to assist in beginning to create a plan for implementing and maintaining Power Platform. Since the CoE Starter Kit is a reference implementation and its templates may not meet the needs of every organisation, it is advised to modify the solution to meet the needs of your own organisation as specified by your CoE.

As administering a CoE involves more than just tools, the kit does not represent the full CoE. People, communication, and clear requirements and procedures are also necessary for the CoE. Although the tools serve to an end, each organisation must carefully consider its needs and preferences when designing the CoE. To assist teams in developing the automation and monitoring required to support a CoE, the kit offers tooling and automation. A Microsoft Dataverse data model and workflows for gathering resource information across the tenant’s environments form the basis of the kit. To see and work with the data you get, the kit comes with a number of apps including Power BI analytics. Additionally, the kit offers a number of templates as well as recommended patterns and procedures for carrying out CoE initiatives.

Establishing tenant hygiene with the CoE Starter Kit:

The Microsoft Power Platform’s organic growth occasionally clashes with an organization’s long-standing plans, such its environmental strategy. Because of this difficulty, Centre of Excellence (CoE) teams may find it challenging to completely comprehend the function and application of the different apps, environments, cloud flows, and bots.
Gaining insight into your tenant’s Power Platform environments may allow you to see previously undiscovered environments. For Power Platform adoption to be controlled and sustained, a clear environment plan is essential. To make sure that makers are creating solutions in the right setting, it is even more crucial to effectively communicate this approach to your organisation. An Environment Overview page in the CoE Starter Kit’s Power BI dashboard lets you see which environments are in your tenant, who created them, and how many apps and processes are made in each environment. One can clear up settings that are vacant or no longer needed with the use of this knowledge. Can collaborate with environment creators to develop an environment strategy that works for their team. By doing this one can manage in the existing environments.

Developer Compliance Centre is part of the governance component of the CoE Starter Kit. By forcing environment owners to give a business rationale for sustaining their environment, this component creates control over environments. This control makes sure that every setting in your tenant is in line with the overarching strategy and objectives of your company. The control makes it easier to see how an environment is being used.

Managing new environment creation and environment requests

Implementing procedures and controls that limit to who is able to generate new environments is one of the most important best practices for managing Power Platform environments. To efficiently handle upcoming environment and DLP requests, the CoE Starter Kit comes with a reference sample for an environment and DLP request management procedure. Your CoE team will be in a good position to oversee and control the surroundings in your tenant if one comprehends and applies this solution.

Managing the default environment

Each Power Platform tenant has a default environment with naturally occurring cloud flows and app growth. Although it cannot be removed, the default environment can be renamed to more accurately represent its intended use. Determining the business value, the risk of current applications and flows, and the underused apps and flows are some of the initial steps in managing the default environment. One can determine whether solutions should be pushed to production environments or have greater levels of support with the aid of the app and flow insights.

Managing Dataverse for Teams environments

A robust low-code data platform called Dataverse for Teams makes it possible to build unique applications and bots from inside of Microsoft Teams. After an app or bot is produced or installed from the app catalogue, Dataverse for Teams automatically creates new environments for every team inside an organisation. Teams can readily access and manage their own data thanks to this provisioning, which also offers a degree of protection and isolation to keep data safe from other teams. For Teams settings that are not used for ninety days, Power Platform has an integrated feature that automatically cleans up Dataverse. One can monitor current environments and their functions, data types, connectors, and other details related to each environment in addition to the automatic cleanup.

The CoE Starter Kit’s Governance components assist you in documenting business rationales for Dataverse for Teams settings. Organisations may make sure they are aware of every environment in use by regularly scanning for new Dataverse for Teams environments. After that, the environments can be examined to see if they conform to the governance and compliance policies of the company.

Securing your environments

The organisation has access to more than 900 connectors, thus controlling connector availability requires a Data Loss Prevention (DLP) plan. You might not be aware of how altering a DLP policy affects your current apps and flows, though.  Before making modifications to current policies or developing new DLP policies, the effect analysis tool, or DLP editor, is accessible for usage. This tool assists you in making well-informed decisions by displaying how changes would affect current apps and cloud flows.

Managing apps and cloud flows

To make sure that the apps and cloud flows that are most frequently used in your company are compliant with the standards, it is essential to identify them.  The CoE Starter Kit’s Power BI dashboard gives you a thorough overview of the most popular apps and workflows in your company, along with useful data that can assist you in making wise decisions.

The CoE Starter Kit's advantages:

Process simplification: The kit assists businesses in automating repetitive procedures and workflows.
Increased productivity: By saving time and effort on manual chores, the kit assists organisations.
Better governance: With capabilities like compliance monitoring and app archiving, the kit assists organisations in enforcing governance regulations.

Better assistance for makers: The kit contains materials for sharing best practices and onboarding new makers.

Better innovation: The kit assists companies in promoting innovation and advancement.
Better alignment with company objectives: Rather than focussing on departmental KPIs, the kit assists organisations in aligning with corporate objectives.

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