The Basics of Microsoft Power Platform Admin Center

the basics of the microsoft power platform admin center
In a digital workplace, finding the right tools to control all your business activities in one place is challenging, especially with the growing need for more solutions and effective management to achieve productivity, security, and balance in an organization. Fortunately, tools like the Microsoft Power Platform and its admin center can help, and we have a team of experts to walk you through the process.

In the previous post, we discussed the Power Platform and its complementary components and their capabilities. In this post, we will discuss the capabilities of the Power Platform Admin Center, what its configurations entail, and its benefits to your organization.

The Power Platform Recap 

The Microsoft Power Platform was developed to help businesses automate repetitive tasks, track business metrics, and build apps, chatbots, and websites with little to no code. It supports both professional developers and individuals with no coding experience, making it ideal for businesses with teams or users with limited technical knowledge.

Business tools like Power BI, Power Apps, Power Pages, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agents are all part of the Power Platform, which can be easily linked with Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Dynamics 365 to speed up daily tasks and simplify business processes. However, organizations need to follow a more formalized method of control to manage the use of these applications. So, this brings us to the Power Platform Admin Center.

Microsoft Power Platform

What is the Microsoft Power Platform Admin Center?

The Power Platform Admin Center is a centralized location where administrators can configure, track, and manage an organization’s tenant environments and applications. It is a unified portal for managing Power Platform resources such as Dataverse, users, licenses, and customer engagement apps (Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Dynamics 365 Field Service, Dynamics 365 Marketing, and Dynamics 365 Project Service Automation). Furthermore, it provides administrators with an easy-to-use interface that provides a simple method to ensure that resources are used optimally with no security breach or access violations.

There are two ways you can access the Power Platform Admin Center:

  • From the Power Apps Environment
    • Sign in with your work or school account.
    • On the upper right-hand side of your screen, click on the settings icon.
    • Select Admin center.
  • From the Portal of the Power Platform Admin Center
Power Platform Admin Center

What is the Power Platform Administrator’s Role?

A Power Platform administrator controls and manages access to resources such as apps and Dataverse databases available on the Power Platform. As an administrator, you oversee developing strategies that use available resources best by managing environments and settings for Power Platform applications and other customer engagement applications such as Dynamics 365 Sales.

Besides these goals, the Power Platform Administrator also has the following responsibilities:

  • Power Platform Administrator tracks the organization’s adoption journey and how users interact with the organization’s data.
  • Admins also manage organization application deployments, which include centrally deploying solutions for the entire organization, orchestrating updates, and troubleshooting issues. While the admin might supervise deployments, this process is often the responsibility of the developers or citizen developers, depending on the organization’s overall strategy.
  • The Power Platform Administrator implements the security and compliance strategy, including data loss prevention, environment handling, and user access.
  • Lastly, the Power Platform Administrator puts what the business decision makers decide into action by enforcing and managing any requirements on the platform.

What makes up the Power Platform Admin Center?

The Power Platform Admin Center portal has the following features:

1. Home Dashboard: The dashboard is a customized homepage for your organization. You can pick a language, theme, time zone, and other settings that allow the administrator to personalize the experience with information like service health data, Microsoft update messages, and much more.

2. Environments: It is where you create and manage the details of your Power Platform environment, such as databases, licenses, user access, and security roles. It is preferable to have separate environments for various business units, projects, and operations. Administrators can control who and what has access to different environments for different business units. For example, assume environment rights are set up in this way; someone in BUB cannot access an application in an environment for BUA.

3. Analytics: Here, essential data reports and metrics for Microsoft Power Platform resources like Dataverse, Power Automate, and Power Apps are displayed. You can also export the data to Power BI for more granular insights or to Excel from the report visual of a Power BI dashboard tile. Under analytics, you will find the following:

  • Dataverse analytics to help report on your organization’s adoption and user metrics. You can filter and customize this data to obtain a detailed usage overview. This report will include active users, API calls, API pass rate, and executions over a given period.
  • Power Automate analytics to report displays information about all flows for every environment and data visualization used for usage, run, creation, errors, and connectors.
  • Power Apps analytics provide environmental insights by highlighting usage, error trends, service performance, and connectors.

4. Resources: This shows the installation, configuration, and management of the apps and portals built with Power Apps, Power Automate, and Dynamics 365 apps. In addition, it has:

  • Capacity to let you manage the Power Platform storage capacity in your environments, Dataverse, Microsoft Teams, Add-ons, and Trial Environments. Add-ons include per-app licenses, AI (Artificial Intelligence) Builder credits, and Portal resources.
  • Ability to install and configure Dynamics 365 applications in your tenant.
  • Portals for viewing and managing all portals across your environment.

5. Help + support: In the Power Platform admin center, you can use the Help + support resources in the Power Platform admin center to get real-time self-help solutions for problems. In addition, you can contact a Microsoft support representative if you cannot resolve the issue.

6. Data Integration: This one-way integration service is used to merge data into Microsoft Dataverse. It enables your organization to prepare data for external consumption by integrating data between multiple Microsoft business applications including finance, operational apps, and Dynamic Sales.

7. Data Gateway: On-premises data gateway enables Power Apps and Power Automate to reach back to on-premises resources to support hybrid integration scenarios. Currently in preview, on-premises data gateway management acts as a link for connecting local databases to the cloud, allowing data to be refreshed in real-time, and transferred quickly and securely.

8. Policies: Here, the admin can create and manage data loss prevention policies to standardize your data’s use, monitoring, and management. It helps you protect and secure all the data within your organization, which is one of the critical pillars of a good security strategy. The policies include:

  • Data policies that help set up and restrict the use of connectors in specific contexts. As a result, environments can be made to serve a particular goal by regulating how users interact with various connectors.
  • Tenant isolation which creates and manages tenant rules to block external tenants from setting up connections with your tenant or vice versa. Again, this is a crucial point for Power Platform security.
  • Customer Lockbox which allows you to control Microsoft operator access to customer content on the Microsoft Power Platform. This will enable administrators and Microsoft operators to work in environments without users’ access. This feature is used to lock an environment for maintenance reasons.
  • Billing policies that enable the admin to create and manage the Azure billing policies for the various environments.

9. Admin centers: It gives you access to other admin centers, which include the Azure Active Directory, Microsoft 365 Admin Center, and Power BI Admin Center.

Power Platform Admin Center

Benefits of using the Power Platform Admin Center

The Power Platform admin center is specifically for managing Power Platform resource access and usage. Additionally, it allows the admin to manage Power Platform operations without having to create scripts on a command line interface.

Let us take a closer look at the benefits the Power Platform Admin Center offers admins and the organization at large:

1. Assigning roles to different users: To work with the Power Platform solutions, users need access to environments and databases that host the applications, flows, and other resources. By assigning security roles, administrators have the entire range of Dataverse security concepts to manage access on an incredibly detailed level.

2. Put in place the environment strategy: The admin center supplies an excellent overview of all environments, including all relevant details such as database status, users, and capacity levels. It is a unified portal that allows administrators to manage Power Platform and Dynamics 365 settings quickly and easily. These will enable your organization to manage licenses, create new environments, assign security roles, and determine the number of users in each environment.

3. Enforce data loss policy: Every business requires a policy to protect against data loss. The admin center provides a user interface for setting and managing these rules by your environmental policy. It is achieved by putting constraints on connectors, defining the use of external data sources, and specifying what data should be conveyed in the tenant and the various environments.

With this, your organization can address data protection and loss prevention, particularly when linking your applications to external sources or third-party services. In addition, it aids in limiting exposure and data vulnerability.

4. Switch on tenant isolation: Tenant isolation lets you set exception policies for sharing data with tenants. These allow you to connect tenants or secure your data according to your business needs.

5. Track the usage: The administration center generates reports on resource usage in your tenants. These allow you to see the storage ability and know which storage and environments are using it. Monitoring critical business applications improve security.

6. Insightful visuals: Analysis that helps organizations make informed decisions. Admins can gain more insights into the organization’s metrics.

What can CollabPoint do for you?

Controlling how effectively your organization uses its resources is a step in the right direction. The Power Platform Admin Center helps you take that crucial first step toward gaining greater control, deep insight, and security over your Microsoft Power Platform environments, business data, apps, chatbots, and processes.

Check out the CollabPoint blog that explores an array of Microsoft 365 applications, including Power Platform. Also, if you want more from your Microsoft 365 technology, contact CollabPoint.