What does a Power Platform consulting engagement cover, and why does it start with a Center of Excellence?

Governance first, then apps

A Power Platform engagement run by EPC Group settles four questions before the first production app ships: who governs the platform, where makers build, which connectors may be combined, and how finished work reaches production. The order is deliberate. Microsoft describes the default environment as the place many Microsoft 365 experiences use for customizations and automations, and says it isn't intended for long-term or permanent work beyond personal productivity scenarios (Microsoft Learn, Develop a tenant environment strategy to adopt Power Platform at scale, accessed 2026-10-20). Licensed users can start building there on day one, so the governance layer has to exist before a client asks for its fifth app, not after its five-hundredth. A Center of Excellence is the team and the toolset that owns that layer. EPC Group's Power Platform consulting practice therefore opens each engagement by standing up the CoE, the environment model and the data policies, and then builds Power Apps, Power Automate flows and Dataverse solutions inside that structure.

The Center of Excellence: from Starter Kit to admin center

Microsoft no longer actively maintains the Power Platform CoE Starter Kit. Its documentation states that the kit remains available for existing and new deployments but receives no new capabilities, that issues are no longer reviewed, and that its core capabilities now live in the Power Platform admin center through the Inventory, Usage, Monitor and Actions experiences (Microsoft Learn, Microsoft Power Platform Center of Excellence (CoE) Starter Kit transition to Power Platform admin center, accessed 2026-10-20). Inventory lists the apps, flows and agents created across the tenant; Usage tracks adoption and identifies heavily used resources and their owners; Monitor tracks operational health; and Actions surfaces risks and governance recommendations. For automation beyond the portal, the same page points to the Microsoft Power Platform CLI, the Power Platform API, the inventory API and the Power Platform for Admins V2 connector. EPC Group builds the CoE on those native experiences. Where a client already runs the Starter Kit, the engagement maps each dashboard the team relies on to its admin center equivalent and retires custom flows that duplicate it. The CoE itself is a small named group: a platform owner, the Power Platform administrators, a security representative and a maker community lead, with a published intake process for new solutions. EPC Group's Power Platform CoE service sets up that group and its operating calendar.

Environment strategy: default, developer, test and production

Microsoft lists the environment types an environment strategy draws on. The default environment comes with every tenant. Production environments hold permanent work, and production managed environments support extended backup retention from seven days to up to 28 days. Sandbox environments support copy and reset and suit testing and ALM build stages. Developer environments are personal workspaces that isolate a maker's assets; each maker can create one managed developer environment, and developer environments don't count against tenant capacity (Microsoft Learn, Develop a tenant environment strategy to adopt Power Platform at scale, accessed 2026-10-20). The same guidance recommends default environment routing, which redirects makers from the default environment into a personal developer environment that is managed by default, and environment groups, which apply rules such as sharing controls for canvas apps, solution-checker enforcement and backup retention to every environment in the group. An environment must be managed to join a group, it can belong to only one group, and settings governed by a group rule are locked at the environment level. EPC Group's standard layout is a secured default environment renamed for personal productivity, routing into a governed developer group, a test sandbox per business domain, and a managed production environment per domain.

Data policies and connector classification

Data policies are the guardrail on connectors. Microsoft classifies connectors into three data groups: Business, Non-Business and Blocked. An app or flow can use connectors from the Business group or the Non-Business group, but not both, and nothing can use a Blocked connector. When a new policy is created all connectors start in Non-Business, which is also the default group for connectors that Microsoft adds later (Microsoft Learn, Connector classification, accessed 2026-10-20). Microsoft-owned standard connectors can't be blocked, policies apply at environment or tenant level rather than to individual users, and when several policies cover one environment the most restrictive combination applies (Microsoft Learn, Implement a data policy strategy, accessed 2026-10-20). Enforcement is not instant: Microsoft says most changes take effect within an hour and the most extreme cases take up to 24 hours, with violating apps and flows suspended and blocked connections disabled (Microsoft Learn, Data policies, accessed 2026-10-20). For the default environment, Microsoft recommends making Blocked the default group, moving unblockable connectors to Business, blocking the rest, and blocking all custom connector URL patterns (Microsoft Learn, Secure the default environment, accessed 2026-10-20). EPC Group writes the tenant policy, the default-environment policy and one policy per production domain, and customizes the governance error message so a blocked maker reaches the CoE instead of a dead end.

Building and promoting solutions with pipelines

Solutions are the unit of application lifecycle management. Microsoft recommends that makers create a custom solution and set it as the preferred solution in their development environment, so every asset they build lands in it (Microsoft Learn, Develop a tenant environment strategy to adopt Power Platform at scale, accessed 2026-10-20). Pipelines in Power Platform then promote that solution. They deploy the solution with target configuration such as connection references and environment variables, prevalidate dependencies, store managed and unmanaged artifacts in the pipelines host for every run, and push the same exported artifact through each stage in order. Approval-based delegated deployments can run as a service principal; the host should be a production environment; and target environments other than developer environments must be managed environments. Pipelines don't move data stored in Dataverse tables, don't deploy unmanaged solutions and don't deploy across tenants, for which Microsoft points to Azure DevOps or GitHub (Microsoft Learn, Overview of pipelines in Power Platform, accessed 2026-10-20). EPC Group configures pipelines for citizen-led solutions and extends them into Azure DevOps or GitHub for professional developer teams that need source control.

Governing and licensing maker activity

Maker activity is governed through the same admin center and licensed through Microsoft's plans. Microsoft names standalone licenses such as Power Apps Premium and Power Automate Premium as the route to premium capabilities, and says the Power Apps and Power Automate use rights in some Microsoft 365 licenses are intended for Microsoft 365 data and standard connectors and don't carry the same rights as a standalone premium license (Microsoft Learn, Licensing overview for Microsoft Power Platform, accessed 2026-10-20). Managed environments, which most of the controls above depend on, are premium capabilities. Microsoft recommends license auto-claim policies when a strategy includes managed environments, so a user is assigned a Power Apps or Power Automate license only when they launch a premium app or run a premium flow (Microsoft Learn, Develop a tenant environment strategy to adopt Power Platform at scale, accessed 2026-10-20). EPC Group's licensing review maps each production solution to the license it needs, and the client's Microsoft licensing contact confirms entitlements against the Power Platform Licensing Guide.

Documented work

ANON-CASES: EPC Group engagement data for Power Platform governance covers mid-size and large organizations in healthcare, financial services and manufacturing moving from unmanaged default-environment growth to a named Center of Excellence, routed developer environments, tiered data policies and pipeline-based promotion, delivered by the firm's Power Platform consulting and Power Platform CoE practices. Client names are not published here. Engagements are described by industry and organization size only, and no outcome figures are quoted that cannot be traced to a signed deliverable. EPC Group is a Microsoft Solutions Partner with all six Solutions Partner Designations as of October 2026.

Frequently Asked Questions

Talk to a senior architect

If makers in your tenant are still building in the default environment with no data policy in place, a 30-minute discovery call with a senior EPC Group architect sets out the CoE roles, the environment groups and the policies to put in first. See the Power Platform consulting service hub for engagement structures.

Email contact@epcgroup.net or call 888-381-9725.

a Microsoft Gold Partner (2000 until Microsoft retired the program in 2022) — today holding all six Microsoft Solutions Partner Designations.