April 2024 ALM blog: What’s new and what it means for you
Casey Burke, Principal Product Manager, 11 เมษายน 2567
With enterprises rapidly expanding Power Platform adoption, and non-traditional and traditional developers building business critical solutions, we’ve needed to re-imagine enterprise ALM in Power Platform. As this story unfolds, customers can adopt a unified ALM strategy across their entire portfolio while drastically reducing overhead, complexity, and failure points. This post outlines various new capabilities materializing under this vision and how to align your organization’s ALM strategy for the next generation of growth.
With these updates, we’re excited to announce the general availability of delegated deployments for pipelines in Power Platform! Additionally, admins can now enable pipelines for multi-geo support, making it easy to centrally administer global deployments within a single management plane.
Build
As makers develop, customizations are automatically saved to their preferred solution (no need to understand or navigate to solutions). This avoids downstream deployment issues, painful debugging steps, and other common mishaps.
When authoring solution cloud flows, drafts and versioning provides a history for each published version of the flow. Makers can view the version history, restore prior versions, and save draft changes without publishing them live – even if the flow has errors! Then, the flow can be published when they are ready to run the flow. Please leave your drafts and versioning comments and feedback here.
Test
Admins can improve quality by ensuring solution checker runs on every deployment, and configure issue tolerance levels for different environments. Pipelines can be extended to run additional code and security scanning tools, or automated tests by integrating your source control systems. Functional user acceptance testing is also recommended after deployment to test environments.
We recommend starting with pipelines in Power Platform and using extensions if you need to integrate more advanced workloads running in Azure DevOps, GitHub, etc. Similarly, if taking dependencies on test automation, we recommend Test Engine.
Release
Makers are guided to deploy at the right time. For example, when manually exporting and importing solutions or blocked by sharing limits.
Instead, sharing isrequested during deployment to target environments, like production, where it’s appropriate to share broadly. Admins simply need to approve the combined deployment and sharing request, and the rest happens automatically. Sharing is rolling out for canvas apps and soon for cloud flows and security roles.
Makers can also update existing environment variables and connection references in pipelines and solution import. Combined, these capabilities protect production assets with least privileged access, reduce admin burden, and train makers to submit all updates via your organization’s change management process. If admins haven’t configured pipelines and governance policies, makers are empowered to create their own pipeline to environments (they must already have access to manually import solutions. Pipelines doesn’t escalate permissions). Admins can apply additional governance controls and manage security within the default host and custom hosts. There’s a new entry point within the solution experience to Manage pipelines and a Security Teams section in the app to manage pipelines access. Note: we currently recommend using a custom pipelines host when more advanced control is desired.
Why pipelines vs manual export/import? Unlike manual export/import, pipelines stores backups for every version of every solution deployed, and admin accessible audit logs describing who, what, when, where, and why (AI provided). Pipelines deployments enjoy higher success rates by pre-validating solutions against target environments and sequencingmultiple deployments to avoid conflicts.
What if breaking changes are inadvertently deployed? Now makers and admins can now re-deploy prior solution versions using pipelines or developer tooling.
Disclaimer: Some capabilities are still rolling out and may not be available yet in your region. Some require admin opt-in, and others can be enabled by installing the latest version of the Power Platform Pipelines application or Power Platform CLI. Documentation updates have a different lifecycle than blogs – please be patient if you don’t see something on docs right away. Thank you!
Developers
We’re incredibly excited for the Microsoft Build conference next month. We have big announcements planed that we think you’ll love!
When authoring solution cloud flows, drafts and versioning provides a history for each published version of the flow. Makers can view the version history, restore prior versions, and save draft changes without publishing them live – even if the flow has errors! Then, the flow can be published when they are ready to run the flow. Please leave your drafts and versioning comments and feedback here. 
Admins can apply additional governance controls and manage security within the default host and custom hosts. There’s a new entry point within the solution experience to Manage pipelines and a Security Teams section in the app to manage pipelines access. Note: we currently recommend using a custom pipelines host when more advanced control is desired. 
Admins can apply additional governance controls and manage security within the default host and custom hosts. There’s a new entry point within the solution experience to Manage pipelines and a Security Teams section in the app to manage pipelines access. Note: we currently recommend using a custom pipelines host when more advanced control is desired. 
