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Power Apps Environments
Microsoft Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform
OK, I want to demo some of the admin and maker portals for you. So you get an idea of how to find your way around the different places. I’m going to start out at admin.powerplatf orm.microsoft.com. This is in a new environment. I haven’t created any environments. It’s brand new, ready to give a try out on here. So if I go to environments, you’ll notice I have no environments on there. I can’t create environments from here. There are two places you go to create environments, depending on whether you want just a Power Apps environment, a CDS with no Dynamics 365 apps, or whether you have licences for Dynamics 365 apps.
And we’ll look at both of those very briefly as we go through here. I’m going to start out by going to admin centres. And I’m going to go to Power Apps Admin Centre. Now one thing to mention, the admin.powerplatf orm.microsoft.com can only be accessed by you if you have currently a global admin in the tenant. The service admin won’t allow you to get to here. So you may be blocked from getting into this portal to start with. But you can get to the Power Apps portal. So I’m going to go to admin.powerapps.com. And you’ll see that we do have a default environment. Default environments don’t show up in admin.powerplatf orm.microsoft.com currently. This is an environment that can’t be deleted.
I’m going to go ahead and create a new environment. I’ll call this practise. I’ll leave it in the United States. And I’ll leave the Environment type as Trial. But you’ll notice I can create either Trial or Production, depending on how permanent I want to be. I’ll go ahead and create the environment. And it will prompt me, do I want to put a CDS database in? I can do this now or I can add it on later. So you don’t have to do it immediately if you don’t want to. So I’m going to go ahead and create the database. It’s going to ask me the currency. This is the base currency in the organisation.
You can apply other alternate currencies and languages, same thing for the base language. I’m going to go ahead and include sample apps in this as well. And I’ll go ahead and tell it to go ahead and create. Now, when it shows up here, that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily done. If I click into it here, it’ll say provisioning database. So we’re going to wait for a few minutes while this takes care of provisioning. Now after a few minutes our database has been provisioned. And you’ll notice that’s done when the screen changes to this view. You may have to refresh the screen to get this.
But when it says Dynamics 365 Admin Centre here, that means that you successfully got the database provisioned. You could go in and administer add other users to it and look at the resources that are involved both the apps and the flo’s. This is a good way to know what’s in that environment if you want to quickly check that out. Now, I’m going to go over to the maker portal. So I’m going to go to web.powerapps.com. This is where you’ll spend most of your time building applications. If I go up into the upper right hand corner here, you’ll notice I have the default environment.
But if I change that to practise, that’s where I would be making my applications or doing any edits. And you notice down here at the bottom as I change from practise to Microsoft again, those apps that are available, that’s because those are tied to that particular environment. You want to pay particular attention to this selector in both the flow portal as well as the web.powerapps.com portal because that determines where you’re making your changes. It’s very easy to get in the wrong environment if you’re not paying attention. You might have to recreate a flow or a power app if you do that in the wrong place. To make changes to the apps, I’ll see my apps that are available.
I can run them from here. I can also edit them. This will show both model driven in Canvas if I had them in the application. I’ll also see my solutions that we’ll be spending a lot of time here making changes and doing the customizations as you go through the practises in the labs. Now the final thing I want to do is I want to go back to the Admin portal. And I want to go to the Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Admin Centre. And what it’s going to do is it’s going to tell me that I have an instance to configure. This could be a sandbox instance or a production instance as it is in this case. I’ll click Configure.
And what it’s going to do is prompt me for what application I want to have installed. I could choose none of the above. It won’t pre instal sales service, field service, project service. Or I could say as I’m going to go do here. I want to have sales installed. I can give it a URL. I’m going to just call this Dave 2018 test. And if it’s available, it will tell me that that’s my URL. Otherwise, it’ll have a little red mark. And you’ll have to pick a different URL that’s available. And then I’ll go ahead and configure my instance for Dynamics 365.
Now, this is a little different than configuring a power apps base environment that we did before because this is going to instal some of the Dynamics 365 applications in it as well. Now we’ll wait for that to finish provisioning. That was pretty quick. Oftentimes, these are pre-staged depending on what you pick. You may get a really quick return on that. And if I go ahead and open that, that will take me into the Dynamics 365 instance.
And you’ll notice that it has sales provision in it. So that’s a quick look at that. The final thing I want to show you is back in the admin.powerplatf orm.microsoft.com, if I go to environments, you’ll notice I now have two environments, my practise one I created, which just has the CDS core entities in it. You’ll notice that the current usage space is zero gigabytes. It’s so small that it won’t register. And I’ve also got the Microsoft course, which is my production instance, which if I drilled down, I would see that the URL is Dave 2018 test because that’s the one I just created. I can see the version of it.
If I go to Settings, it’ll let me change all the common settings. And this is what we’ll be going over in the practise. You’ll actually get a chance to go through and experiment with some of these settings and see what’s in each of the different areas. We’re not going to do it in this video. But you can wander through there on your own. And like we said, in the docs, you may or may not have access to this. You may be working with an administrator.
But I think it’s important as you go through the course that you take the time to explore in case you’re working with an administrator that is not as familiar with Dynamics 365 or the Power Platform and you need to help them along with finding the settings and making the settings sitting next to them or possibly on a conference call. Let’s go ahead and get started with the rest of this module.
In the previous step, we explored the multiple portals which you will interact to configure and manage within Power Platforms. In this step, we go through a demo on the admin and maker portals to get an idea of how to find your way around the different places.
Join the discussion
This video demonstrated how to go about using and navigating admin and maker portals. Do you have a different approach or even some handy tips that you use to work with these portals more effectively?Comment in the Discussion section below. Don’t forget to like and comment on your fellow learners’ views and approaches, click the Mark as Complete button to check the Step off, then you can move to the next step which is Enabling Preview and Experimental Features.
This article is from the online course:
Dynamics 365: Using Power Platform Applications
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Dynamics 365: Using Power Platform Applications
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