Block Unmanaged Customization in Power Platform Environment

Key insights

This advancement in Microsoft Dataverse marks a significant step towards enhancing governance and control over Power Platform environments. The "Block unmanaged customizations" feature aids administrators in enforcing disciplined ALM practices, ensuring changes are reliable, safe, and auditable. By putting these restrictions in place, organizations can better manage their development cycles, maintain integrity in their production environments, and minimize the risks associated with uncontrolled modifications. It's a well-thought-out move by Microsoft to empower organizations with tools to maintain high standards in their application development and management processes.

Understanding Power Platform Governance

Microsoft's Power Platform has evolved rapidly, becoming a cornerstone for business applications development across diverse organizations. As these platforms grow in usage, governance has emerged as a critical concern for administrators. Governance involves the policies, roles, responsibilities, and processes that control how business divisions and IT teams cooperate to achieve business objectives while managing risk.

The introduction of features like "Block unmanaged customizations" directly addresses these concerns by providing mechanisms to enforce best practices in software development and lifecycle management. This ensures that modifications to business systems are conducted in a controlled, visible, and auditable manner, aligning with organizational needs and compliances. In essence, robust governance in Power Platform is pivotal for maximizing its benefits while minimizing potential risks associated with rapid application development and deployment.

Microsoft has introduced a preview feature known as "Block unmanaged customizations" for Power Platform system administrators. This feature, accessible in the Microsoft Dataverse environments by preventing unmanaged customizations. By activating this environment setting, administrators are empowered to ensure that alterations to their environments, particularly production environments, adhere to stringent application lifecycle management (ALM) processes that come with adequate safety, visibility, and auditing measures.

The announcement of the public preview of this capability brings excitement to the Power Platform community, as it offers a way to prevent unmanaged customizations and imports of unmanaged solutions. This initiative ensures that any modifications to both test and production environments undergo approved ALM processes, emphasizing reliability and security. The default setting of "Block unmanaged customizations" is disabled, allowing administrators the choice to enable it based on their specific needs and preferences.

Once enabled, this setting imposes several restrictions on the environment, such as blocking the import of unmanaged solutions, preventing the creation of new solution objects like apps, tables, and forms, and disabling customization of existing solution objects. Any attempts at making unmanaged customizations will result in an error message, reinforcing the rule set by the administrator. However, certain operations, such as changing environment variable values, enabling or disabling solution objects, and creating and exporting unmanaged solutions, are not affected by this feature.

• Import of unmanaged solutions into the environment are blocked.
• Creation of new solution objects like apps, tables, and forms are blocked.
• Customizing existing solution objects are blocked.
• Operations like changing environment variable values and enabling or disabling of solution objects are not blocked.

It's important to note that the "Block unmanaged customizations" feature cannot be enabled in the default environment, ensuring that initial testing and exploration of Dataverse capabilities remain unhindered. This new feature reflects Microsoft's commitment to fostering secure and controlled environments within the Power Platform ecosystem, emphasizing the importance of governance and proper management in digital transformation initiatives.