Yesterday, I was providing a first overview on the latest Governance improvements introduced to Power Platform via Default Environment Routing being introduced as public preview. Admins being equipped with this feature to automatically route new Makers into a personal developer environment that gets provisioned for them when first-time entering make.powerapps.com. There´s been other blog overviews provided as well as valuable LinkedIn discussions, such as:
- Default Environment – How to handle?
- Hands down, this is the feature I’ve been waiting for the most:
Environment routing! 🚀🚀
Admins are tasked to ensure a proper working scale-out and management on company´s environment strategy, but they´re typically also tasked to ensure a proper license assignment & -management. Microsoft is offering some help and improvements for this, such as auto-claim for Power Apps licenses. But these are just a few of the tasks administrators or CoE Teams being responsible for.
With Default Environment Routing they now have an option to tame a typical scenario that happened a lot in a company´s environment setup: While onboarding new Makers, they ended up creating their artifacts or performing tests for their personal skill-up inside the Default Environment. This especially caused issues, when Makers didn´t delete their artifacts after their tests, or they didn´t took care of proactively requesting for premium licensing for users using their artifacts.
Note: We might ask, if this is the Makers responsibility or if this is the task of a license administrator.
So in an enterprise company the Default Environment Routing feature now being added causes some asks. One of them being: Which license can be used for ensuring a proper licensing for users acting in environments? Specifically, if we consider that as an Admin you have more goals to achieve:
- Enabling a collaborative all-up Power Platform experience
- Implement an ALM strategy for business critical artifacts being managed
- Allow for either or both personal- and collaborative development experiences
- Ensure a proper licensing, while taking care of the ROI
- Make the most usage of environments being containers to control security
- …
With above visual, I am offering a decision tree, which hopefully allows for a clearer picture in regards of using the Power Apps Developer Plan or using a standalone paid plan. As you can see it starts with a first decision around collaborative development. And there´s no black or white to this, as I´ve seen many companies decide for both a personal- and a shared or project-based development strategy.
Same as production environments, any development environment is also being assigned one or more DLP policies to ensure security and follow least priviledges principles. Some company show a preference on a split between M365 seeded licensing artifacts and those causing premium licenses. Again, there´s no black or white on this. A „blended strategy“ is the sweetspot for many companies.
The next decision is up on implementing an ALM via Pipelines for Power Platform. A critical ask that should be answered from the very first beginning. Really not every app or flow needs ALM, but managing business critical artifacts with the help of ALM tools is so much easier than doing all this manually.
And last, but not least, you do find the latest kid in the house. Your decision on enabling Default Environment Routing or not. As this is a Tenant-wide setting, you will need to weigh-in the pros vs. cons. One of it being the licensing implication as outlined in the visual.
In future articles, I will certainly talk about other business values offered, but for this time the focus was only on demystifying the usage of a Power Apps Developer Plan. Until then,…
The Power Platform Talks 
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