Announcing General Availability of Block unmanaged customizations

We are excited to announce General Availability of Block unmanaged customizations. This is an environment setting that allows Power Platform system administrators to block direct development in production environments by preventing unmanaged customizations. By blocking any unmanaged customizations and import of unmanaged solutions, admins can ensure that any changes to the environment, specifically the test and production environments, are only going through approved application lifecycle management (ALM) processes that have reliability, safety, and auditing.

This feature will ensure that solution deployments are predictable and consistent and enforces that all changes to production environments go through ALM processes. With this feature, the system administrators will be able to block unmanaged customizations by not allowing direct changes in the environment and by not allowing import of unmanaged solutions in Microsoft Dataverse environments. Unmanaged customizations become the top layer, which blocks managed solutions from being effective. These direct changes in the environment bypass formal ALM processes like testing and approvals.

This feature can be enabled or disabled from the Features area of the environment settings page in the Power Platform admin center. By default, this setting is disabled. The feature cannot be enabled in the default environment. Before enabling the feature, please review the known limitations as some application experiences may be limited.

Once the setting is enabled these restrictions will be imposed for the environment:

• Import of unmanaged solutions into the environment are blocked.
• Creation of new solution objects like apps, tables, and forms are blocked.
• Customizing existing solution objects are blocked.
• Any attempt to make unmanaged customizations will result in an error returned to the user, such as: “This environment doesn’t allow unmanaged customizations. This was a choice made by your admin, and certain actions won’t be available or will be view only.”

The following operations are not blocked by this feature:

• Change of environment variable values.
• Enabling or disabling of solution objects. For example, turning Power Automate flows on or off.
• Assigning of ownership or sharing of table records.
• Solutions operations like remove active customizations.
• Creation and export of unmanaged solutions.

Learn more

• Block unmanaged customizations: Block unmanaged customizations
• Solution layers and unmanaged customizations here: Solution layers
• Blog post from public preview: Announcing preview for blocking unmanaged customizations | Microsoft Power Apps