Plan and prepare for governance and administration in 2024 release wave 2

Important

The 2024 release wave 2 plan covers all new functionalities planned to be delivered to market from October 2024 to March 2025. In this article, you'll find the product overview and what's new and planned for governance and administration.

Overview

Power Platform and Dynamics 365 provide intuitive, yet powerful governance tools for enterprise-level management of low code and enterprise, critical assets. These tools include robust security, comprehensive compliance, and straightforward administrative features that ensure top-tier protection and proactive governance, along with seamless integration with other Microsoft solutions. The Power Platform admin center enhances license and capacity oversight, offering insights and helpful suggestions to improve resource use and cost-effectiveness. It also brings a new dimension to customer support with intuitive, self-service resources, real-time service health updates, and streamlined ticket handling. Application lifecycle management (ALM) becomes more transparent across the organization, enabling IT to easily certify widely-used assets in a scalable, uncomplicated manner. Collectively, the new enhancements streamline the adoption of the highly anticipated Microsoft Copilot features, allowing IT departments to safely expand low code usage within the enterprise and establish Power Platform as the premier choice for modernizing and developing enterprise solutions.

In this wave, we're adding new governance capabilities that allow customers to manage Power Platform more easily at scale. Key investments for this wave include:

• Enhancements to the admin center experience, which includes organizing functionalities in themes around governance tasks for a more streamlined experience and enhanced focus on Copilot adoption and security.
• Upgrades to pipelines and the introduction of new ALM features that are designed to assist enterprises in deploying and operating mission-critical assets on the platform more effectively.
• Advanced routing mechanisms to steer users to the right environments, decreasing dependence on the widely shared, default environment and introducing a simpler environment strategy that simplifies the governance at scale.

Investment areas

Enterprise-scale administration
IT administrators can leverage a suite of tools to manage high volumes of Power Platform and Dynamics 365 assets with heightened efficiency and precision. The approach streamlines environment management, supports systematic bulk governance, and delivers built-in, best practice recommendations to ensure an optimized, secure, and compliant operational framework. With a unified interface bolstered by advanced automation tools, such as API, PowerShell, Microsoft Power Platform CLI, or connectors, administrators are equipped to fully automate tasks, enabling efficient manipulation and maintenance of extensive assets across the infrastructure.

Security and compliance
This feature area includes enterprise-grade protection for all Power Platform assets with admin tools for managing the security of Power Platform and Dynamics 365 at scale. It enables data protection with secure guardrails and allows for the safeguarding of the entire deployment with integrated solutions. Interoperability with Microsoft solutions heighten security posture, while continuous governance tailors to up-to-date regulations. Proactive measures and policies guide makers in secure development. Security by default, scaled visibility, and comprehensive auditing capabilities enhance the platform's security measures, ensuring end-to-end visibility and compliance.

Unified experience for Power Platform and finance and operations apps
As part of the unification of admin experiences of finance and operations apps within Power Platform, the environment for finance and operations apps is now an application within Power Platform. Therefore, multiple Dynamics 365 applications, such as Sales, Marketing, finance and operations, and apps, flows, and websites in Power Platform can be installed and hosted in the same Power Platform environment with a Dataverse database. This unification provides a consistent and single set of lifecycle operations that an admin can perform across all artifacts.

The unified admin experience brings user, administrative, and developer experiences together for both Power Platform and finance and operations apps. This enables complete, end-to-end business application experiences for users who use these apps, and for admins and developers who maintain and customize these apps.

To learn more about the entire set of capabilities being delivered during this release wave, check out the release plan for Platform governance and administration below:

Check out the release plan

For application administrators

User-impacting features to the user experience enabled automatically
User-impacting features should be reviewed by application administrators. This facilitates release change management and enables successful onboarding of new capabilities released to market. For the complete list, look for all features tagged "Users, automatically" in the release plan.

Features that must be enabled by application administrators
This release wave contains features that must be enabled or configured by administrators, makers, or business analysts to be available for their users. For the complete list, look for all features tagged "Users by admins, makers, or analysts" in the release plan.