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Do I need a Sandbox environment AND a Production environment, or is it enough to have a single Production environment for customizations?

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Posted on by KVa

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How to decide how many environments are needed for the development of model driven apps? Those apps are used internally.

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Microsoft Dataverse with Power Apps

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mobcdi 43 on at

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I'm not an expert but I would think it would be useful to have separate environments to ensure development doesn't impact on production users but also to use solutions to package up your apps to help with moving between the environments

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MarioRing 541 Super User 2024 Season 1 on at

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Yes, it is recommended to have multiple environments, even more than two. The industry standard is having at least three:
Development environment, where you are actually creating all the stuff
Test environment, where you are obviously testing new features and the whole integrity. The environment is usually updated when you created something new and you have to verify if it is safe to update the production.
Production environment, where you put fully verified and tested solutions and where you store your actual business data.
When you have only one all-purposes environment you may:
Disturb users with errors. During the development, not all the features work since the beginning.
Sometimes necessary changes may temporarily block your users from completing their tasks.
Creating new features when the users are not aware of them and don't know how to properly use them.
If you create some automation and make a mistake with the flow you may incidentally lose or overwrite your valuable business data.

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wwweber 146 on at

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I completely agree with @MarioRing
One thing to add is that it can sometimes depend on the complexity of the application. If it is a very simple application that will only run for a few select users and it is not a business critical application then it might suffice with fewer environments. But the recommended best practice is exactly what @MarioRing has stated.

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Mahendar Pal 191 on at

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Hi,

Here is a good article about environment structures for Dynamics 365 CE
https://c5insight.com/the-question-of-d365-environment-structures/

*Updated link

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wwweber 146 on at

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Also, be aware that this typically varies according to needs and can also be dictated by internal IT processes.

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Fubar 8,501 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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I would generally recommend at least 2 non-production for anything serious (and we have clients that have more). Moving from Development to Test allows you to also test your actual deployment steps are sound before repeating for Production.

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