Hi All,

In last article Power Platform – AI Builder for beginners – Part 1 we started discussing Power Platform, AI Builder. My main focus is AI Builder. Before actually going to delve, lets discuss Environments first, which is again very important feature to understand while working with Power Platform.

Background: Whenever we navigate to either Power Automate or Power Apps, at right hand corner we will see “Environments” as

So here questions are

1. What is Environment?
2. What is default Environment?
3. What Roles Environments plays?

Environments:

1. MS defines Environment : ” An environment is a space to store, manage, and share your organization’s business data, apps, connections, and flows. “
2. Default Environment:
   • The default environment is created automatically by Power Apps for every tenant. For example my local tenant – https://knowledgejunction1.sharepoint.com/, default tenant with name “knowledgejunction1” as shown in above Fig1 and Fig2.
   • Default environment is shared by all the tenant users. All tenant users are automatically added to Maker Role of default environment, also we cant remove them from this role.
   • Default environment neither disabled nor deleted.
3. Whenever new user is log in to Power Apps, Dyanmics 365, user is automatically added to the Maker roles of Environment. We will discuss environment roles in depth in below section.
4. Each environment is created under a Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) tenant, and can only be accessed by users within that tenant.
5. Environment is also bound to specific geographic locations. When environment is created in specific location like US, then all the apps in this environment routes to this location
6. Scenarios for the environments:
   • Test environment and PROD environment for testing our apps and flows in different environment
   • Environment for specific team or department

Managing Environments:

• Environments are managed from Power Apps admin center – https://admin.powerapps.com/environments
• Once we logged in to Power Apps admin, there is “Environments” tab, which is by default selected and in right panel we will see all the environments available as shown in following figure

• To see the details of Environment, just click on Environment, Environment details page will be opened as

• Environment details page contains 3 tabs as
  • Details : Shows the details who created Environment, when created, in which region Environment created, unique name of environment etc. As in Fig3
  • Security : Security tab enables us to Add Users to Environment. Currently this feature is in preview. We can also see list of users and manage them. Manage user roles. Assign security roles. As shown in below Fig4.
  • Resources : Resource tab lists all the Apps and Flows which are in the current Environment. As shown in below Fig5.

Environment Roles: Environments have two built-in roles before Common Database Service database is created in environment

• Environment Admin Role – Perform following actions
  1. Add / Remove the user / group to Environment Admin or Environment Maker role
  2. Provision Common Database Service database for environment
  3. View and manage all resources created within an environment
  4. Set data loss prevention policies.

• Environment Maker Role – Perform following actions
  1. Creating resources within an environment including apps, connections, custom connectors, gateways, and flows using Power Automate.
  2. Can share the apps with users, security groups.

What Next: Creating and Managing environments. Roles when CDS database is created.

References:

• Environments overview