Tutorial: Provision a new environment with an ERP-based template
Finance and operations apps have been reimagined as an application hosted by Microsoft Dataverse. No longer do customers need to provision their enterprise resource planning (ERP) system separately from their low-code and other Dynamics 365 platform applications. Additionally, most administrative actions in Power Platform are available through the admin center and an API-based experience.
In this tutorial, learn how to:
- Go to the Power Platform admin center and create a new environment using a template based on your assigned license.
- Provision a developer-focused sandbox using PowerShell to use with X++ code.
- Delete an environment when no longer in use.
As an example of this scenario, a customer who operates their finance and operations apps environments in Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services can provision one of the newer, developer-focused sandboxes in the Power Platform admin center.
Environment provisioning
The easiest way to get finance and operations apps up and running in Power Platform is to create a new environment using a template. A template is simply an efficiency in terms of creating a Dataverse-based Power Platform environment with several applications preinstalled. In this scenario, the finance and operations ERP application is installed automatically upon environment creation.
Before you begin
You can't provision finance and operations apps in Power Platform unless you have a license assigned that grants this permission. An example license is Dynamics 365 Finance or Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management for customers, and Dynamics 365 Operations Application Partner Sandbox for partners and ISVs. This must be assigned by your license administrator to your user account in Microsoft Entra. You can review the licenses currently assigned to you in the Subscription table on the MyAccount page.
You also must have at least 1 gigabyte of available Operations and Dataverse database capacities. For more information, see Manage storage and capacity.
Knowing which template to provision
All Dynamics 365 environment templates are associated with their related full user licenses. This means that the admin user in the Power Platform admin center must have a full license assigned to them to be able to create one of these environments, and the same holds true when using tools like PowerShell as well. The following table shows the mapping between various finance and operations apps licenses and their template details.
| License | Template name | Template ID | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dynamics 365 Finance | Finance (preview) | D365_FinOps_Finance | |
| Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management (preview) | Supply Chain Management (preview) | D365_FinOps_SCM | |
| Dynamics 365 Project Operations | Project Operations Integrated (preview) | D365_FinOps_ProjOps | |
| Dynamics 365 Operations Application Partner Sandbox | Project Operations Integrated (preview) | D365_FinOps_ProjOps | |
| Dynamics 365 Commerce | Commerce (preview) | D365_FinOps_Commerce | This template is available only for trials. |
Known limitations
Be sure to check out the latest known limitations available in the overview article Unified admin experience for finance and operations apps.
Step-by-step provisioning guide
Create an environment
Important
You can't currently use the user interface (UI) to create new sandbox and production environments that have finance and operations apps. However, this capability is planned for a future release.
If you want to create a new environment where finance and operations apps are pre-installed, you can use the information on the "PowerShell" tab to complete this task in a single action. If you require the UI, follow the steps in Tutorial: Install the Finance and Operations Provisioning App.
In the above example, we used the Finance environment template. See above in this article for a table reference of all templates available by license. Also note that your environment name must be globally unique and less than 20 characters because that derives the environment URL. There are plans to add upfront validation in the future.
Delete the environment
In this step, delete the environment you previously created. Deleting an environment is an action commonly done by admins who want to reclaim capacity for other purposes. An environment can be deleted using the Power Platform admin center, or PowerShell as follows.
Select a specific environment, and then select the Delete button in the action bar at the top of the page.
Confirm that you want to delete the environment and proceed. This operation starts the deletion process and frees up the Dataverse and Operations storage consumed by this environment for other needs.