Now available: CoE Starter Kit in Dataverse for Teams (and other improvements)

In 2019, we launched the Center of Excellence (CoE) Starter Kit – a set of templates that are designed to help you get started with developing a strategy for adopting, maintaining and supporting the Power Platform, with a focus on Power Apps and Power Automate. In the past two years we’ve continued to evolve and innovate as we continue to learn from our customers – and today are excited to announce that the CoE Starter Kit can now be installed in Dataverse for Teams environments. You can now make the Admin, Governance and Nurture templates in the kit a core part of your collaboration with admins, makers and end users in Teams.

Get started using the CoE Starter Kit in Teams

1. Download the solution pack at aka.ms/CoEStarterKitDownload.
2. If you don’t already have a Power Platform CoE team in Microsoft Teams, create one now and add the Power Apps app to your team.
3. First, set up the CoE Starter Kit – Core Components solution to gain enterprise-wide insights into your adoption and drive your strategy with the value of analytics.
4. Pin the Power Platform Admin View and Power BI Dashboard to your team and familiarize yourself with resources and makers already in your environments.
5. Use the Power Platform Admin View to view a list of your environments, apps and flows, get further details and add compliance information such as a business justification and support plan.
   
6. Use the Power BI dashboard for trend analysis to see if your adoption is growing or use the rich set of filters to see which apps or makers are using which connectors, and which makers are most active.
   
7. Also add the Set App and Flow Permissions and DLP Editor apps to the team to help with operational tasks such as changing ownership and analysing impact of DLP policies.
8. Once you are familiar with your adoption and existing resources, set up the CoE Starter Kit – Governance Components solution and establish audit, compliance and archive processes.
9. Share the Developer Compliance Center app with your makers as a broad distribution app and start collecting compliance information about your resources to inform your Support and Operations processes.
   
10. Use the flows in this solution to govern and manage Dataverse for Teams environments and archive unused and orphaned resources.
11. Start nurturing a thriving community and set up the CoE Starter Kit – Nurture Components solution to accelerate your adoption with the templates in this solution.
12. Organize internal training events and hackathons and ask users to sign up via the Training in a Day registration app – this means that even those new to Power Apps will have interacted with one before the event:
    

Additional updates

The above is part of the April release of the CoE Starter Kit. Here’s what else we have added:

We are now capturing Capacity and Add-On information for Environments, and you can add additional metadata like a business area or cost code to an environment to enable better reporting and grouping of environments. Admins can also set approved capacity in the Power Platform Admin View and receive alerts when environments are over or close to their approved capacity.

The Power BI Report has been changed from Import to DirectQuery mode and is using the new Dataverse connector to get the data. This means you will no longer need to set a schedule refresh on the dataset.

We have added a new Maker Assessment app to the Nurture components. This app will take a maker through a set of questions, and provide them with governance and license considerations to keep in mind. The goal is for a maker to make the best decision possible before starting to build the app. We provide a starter set of questions that you can update and change.

About the CoE Starter Kit

A Microsoft Power Platform Center of Excellence (CoE) means investing in and nurturing organic growth while maintaining governance and control. A CoE is designed to drive innovation and improvement, and as a central function it can break down geographic and organizational silos. A CoE can be a powerful way for an organization to align around business goals rather than individual department metrics. A key principle is to clarify why you’re setting up a CoE, what you aim to accomplish, and the key business outcomes you hope to achieve.

The CoE Starter Kit provides some automation and tooling to help teams build monitoring and automation necessary to support a CoE. It represents what we’ve learned from some of the largest organizations implementing Microsoft Power Platform.  This tool, built with Microsoft Power Platform, is intended to be just that: a starter kit for technology to enable your processes. It can help with the how, once you’ve established the what and why.

Disclaimer

Although the underlying features and components used to build the Center of Excellence (CoE) Starter Kit (such as Dataverse and connectors) are fully supported, the kit itself represents sample implementations of these features. Our customers and community can use and customize these features to implement admin and governance capabilities in their organizations.

If you face issues with:

• Using the kit: Report your issue here: aka.ms/coe-starter-kit-issues (Microsoft Support won’t help you with issues related to this kit, but they will help with related, underlying platform and feature issues.)
• The core features in Power Platform: Use your standard channel to contact Support.