Power Platform environments

What is a Power Platform environment?

An environment in the Power Platform is an "organizational space" where different objects in a development solution can be stored, managed and shared. These could be data, applications, chatbots and flows. You should think of an environment as a "box" that contains everything necessary for digital operations.

Why do we need environments?

Environments are useful because they allow you to organize and isolate different parts of your digital work. Each environment can be configured to have its own specific applications, data and even security requirements. This is useful when different groups within the organization have different needs.

How to set up environments?

Single environment:

If you're building something simple, like a single app or chatbot, you can choose to put all the objects in a single environment. This is like having everyone in a single basket.

Test and production environments:

For more complex projects, you can create separate environments for testing and production. This helps ensure that changes do not cause operational problems.

Environments by Team or Department:

If different teams or departments in the company are working on different things, you can create specific environments for each. Each environment contains what is relevant to each team or department.

Global environments:

If the company has global operations, separate environments can be created for different branches, for example. This helps to keep things organized and adapted to local needs.

In short, the choice of how to use environments depends on the specific needs of your organization and the projects to be developed. It's a flexible way of organizing digital work to meet the diverse needs of the company.

Types of environments

There are various types of environments. The type indicates the purpose of the environment and determines its characteristics. The following table summarizes the current types of environments you can find.

Type	Description	Security
Production	This should be used to carry out permanent work in an organization. It can be created and owned by an administrator or anyone with a Power Apps license, as long as there is available database capacity of 1 GB. These environments are also created for each existing Dataverse database when it is upgraded to version 9.0 or later. Production environments are what you should use for all the environments you depend on.	Complete control.
Preset	These are a special type of production environment. Each tenant has a predefined environment that is created automatically.	Limited control. All licensed users have the role of environment creator.
Sandbox	These are non-production environments, which offer functionalities such as copy and restore. Sandbox environments are used for development and testing, separate from production. Provisioning of sandbox environments can be restricted to administrators (because creation of the production environment can be blocked), but conversion from production to a sandbox environment can be blocked.	Complete control. If used for testing, only user access is required. Developers need environment creator access to create resources.
Evaluation	Evaluation environments are intended to support short-term testing needs and are cleared automatically after a short period of time. They expire after 30 days and are limited to one per user. Provisioning evaluation environments can be restricted to administrators.	Complete control.
Programmer	Developer environments are created by users who have the Developer Plan license. They are special environments intended only for use by the owner. Provisioning developer environments can be restricted to administrators.	Limited control. It is not possible to assign security groups to programming environments.
Microsoft Dataverse for Teams	Dataverse for Teams environments are automatically created for the selected team when you create an application in Teams using the application for the first time or install an application from the application catalog.	Limited control. Administrators have limited limitations available for Teams environments. No customization of access rights or assignments is available. Teams members are automatically mapped to their Teams member type - owners, members and guests - with a corresponding access right assigned by the system.