Administration Settings

In the previous step, we learned about Enabling Preview and Experimental Features. In this step, we uncover the Administration Settings.

Each Common Data Service environment has settings that are specific to that instance. These settings can be used to tailor the environment to your business needs. The settings are specific to that environment and must be individually re-created in other environments.

For example, it is very common to start with a development environment and then, when you are ready to go live, ask your administrator to apply the same settings to the production environment. In locked-down environments where you are not an administrator, you will have to communicate with and rely on administrators to make many of these changes.

These settings can be updated via the admin portal (admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com) or, in environments with Dynamics 365 applications, in the legacy web interface via Settings – > Business Management; Settings -> Security; Settings -> Email Configuration; Settings -> Data Management; and Settings -> Administration -> System Settings. For the purposes of this step, we will focus on the settings in the Power platform Admin center.

The settings are broadly grouped into Product, Business, User and Permissions, Email, Services, and Data Management. While we are not going to cover every option of these settings, we will highlight some of the more common ones.

Product Settings

In Product settings -> Features you will find the switches for enabling auditing. This is the master switch for the instance, even if you configure auditing on individual entities and fields, without this setting enabled you will not get any audit data recorded. Even in development and test environments auditing can be helpful to diagnose problems in some scenarios like automation.

The more modern Relevance Search can also be enabled from here. You can enable Skype and Skype for Business presence indicators as well.

By default, you choose a base language when setting up your environment. In the Product settings area, you can enable additional languages that are available to users.

Business Settings

Using Business settings -> Calendar you can configure the fiscal year settings. Configuring these allow views and other queries to filter data using criteria like show me all records created in this fiscal year. This can be very helpful when your business fiscal year is different from the traditional calendar year.

Currencies are also configured from the Business settings area. By default, you choose a base currency when setting up your environment. This allows you to configure additional currencies that users can select as the transactional currency on a data record. This is also where you specify the exchange rate between your base currency and the additional currency. It’s important to note, these conversion rates do not update automatically without further custom automation.

We cover Users and Permissions in more detail in the Security activity in Week 4 of this course and Email and Data Management are covered in the course Implementing Power Platform Integrations.

In addition to these organisation-wide settings, individual apps might have settings of their own that you can configure. For example, Dynamics 365 for Sales has a configuration for Sales Territories and Dynamics 365 for Field Service has a setting for which map provider to use. These application settings are unique to the app and that specific environment they are installed in. To configure these settings you will continue to use the application navigation and not the admin portal.

You can read further on about admin settings here: Power Platform admin settings.

Next up, let’s learn about Creating Applications.