Introduction to environment roles
Each environment has zero or one instance of a Microsoft Dataverse database. Your organization can have many environments that are available to many different groups of users at a time. It's common practice to set up an environment so you can limit who can access the data, apps, and workflows within it.
Classic software lifecycle management provides a good use case of why you might want to set up different environments in Dataverse. Consider the following example. It's common to segment environments for development, test, and production. Dataverse allows you to set up a development environment and limit access so only developers and a few managers or test users have permission to access the data and apps in that development environment. You can then set up a test environment and set up permissions so that a few test users and developers have access to it and the data within the instance of Dataverse within that environment. Finally, you can set up production environment permissions so that a wide audience of users has access to the production environment and everything in it, including:
- The data in the instance of a Dataverse database
- Power Apps
- Power Automate
Important
Access to an environment does not give a user access to any data, apps, or workflow within that environment. Users must be given explicit access to data by an administrator in Dataverse while the maker who creates an app, connector, or workflow must grant access to their work products.