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Environments for ALM - use Production environment type for all?

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Posted on by Andrew-InTheBox

I've tried to research how to do proper ALM for power pages and other power platform entities and I think it makes sense. Except that it's not totally clear if the environments you use for Dev/Test/Prod should all be of the type Production, or if Dev should be Sandbox or Development?

Also, if the environment will have dataverse entities imported into it as part of a solution migration, does that mean it needs to have the toggle for "add a dataverse store" flipped to yes? Or will any dataverse entities come over in the solution?

Can someone comment on these things and provide recommended best practices?

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Microsoft Dataverse with Power Apps

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Fubar 8,487 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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Environments of type = Development are relatively new, and there are more restrictions/limitations. I generally would treat this as a personal environment rather than a organization level dev environment.
Non-production (sandbox) has been around for a long time and is what has traditionally been used for the Dev, and Test environments (also in the older days you used to have to pay more for a Production environment so very few people would use it for the Dev and Test) - you can also always promote a Non-production (sandbox) to a Production should you want to at any time (without breaking anything) and similarly demote it back to Non-production.

"add a dataverse store" - Yes you would need it to create dataverse tables etc, (basically you are saying setup the database, but as depending on what you are doing you may not need the environment to use Dataverse you get the Yes/No option), you also do not have to enable it when you create the environment it can be setup later on if needed (and you would be prompted to create one when trying to perform some actions that need it).

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Jonathan Manrique 2,695 on at

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Hi @Andrew-InTheBox

Hello, the Microsoft ALM documentation for Power Platform will help you a lot.
https://learn.microsoft.com/es-es/power-platform/alm/

I'll tell you a couple of things that are important to keep in mind and it depends a lot on your type of project and needs.

For example, it is normal that you have a Development environment, a Test environment and a Production environment. Development is a sandbox, testing can be a sandbox and production must be production

Now, there are projects that, due to their complexity, start using 4 environments, Development, a Test environment and a Pre-production Environment and Production Environment.

Everything is the same as the previous one except that the pre-production one is a production copy with the new developments that are expected to be released so that the QA can do the tests recreating the changes with the production data, this environment is also recommended to be production

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Andrew-InTheBox 48 on at

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Ok yes I see it now. Thanks!

"Sandbox - These are non-production environments, which offer features like copy and reset. Sandbox environments are used for development and testing, separate from production."

Still not totally sure on if dataverse would be needed on the target environments but will do a bit more reading and maybe it will become obvious.

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Andrew-InTheBox 48 on at

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Great, thanks. Much appreciated.

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