Solution Architecture: Environments vs. Business Units

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Posted on by carl1to

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Let's assume you should build a solution for a business problem in a large corporation.

The business problem is to track, manage and approve projects.
Your corporation has several firms that share more or less the same process for doing this.
Firms don't share the data about their projects

solution architecture.png

How do you decide if you separate the solution through environments or business units?

Would you agree to seek going with a single productive environment as long as:

- the firms are in the same geographical region

- use the same processes

- requirements regarding data security/access are identical

- you are allowed to store the data in a common place

...

I would love to read your thoughts about this.

Edit: I just found a great resource about Solution Architecture: https://aka.ms/D365ImplementationGuide/#p=192

Categories:

Microsoft Dataverse with Power Apps

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Drew Poggemann 9,287 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Hi @carl1to ,

Overall I think you have done a good job articulating the reasons to separate or keep the environments together. To be honest, most of the time I keep a single Organization / Environment and utilize Business Units to isolate the data as needed. I have not come into many situations where this has failed me and it helps me to get alignment (organizationally) on governance for projects like this. Example, it helps to solidify the appropriate statuses across the organization, the milestones, approvals, etc. for your project and program management.

Also, inevitably you will want to add shared data and processes within this environment where all the divisions will want to use that will contain organizational shared data and then keeping in single environment will make even more sense.

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carl1to 208 on at

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Hi Drew

Thank you for sharing your experience!

I also think that having the solutions in a single environment has several advantages and totally agree with your points.
With the security tools from dataverse it is manageable to handle the data separation in one single environment. With Business-Units & Security-Roles you can accomplish this.

I think, the situation gets complex when you have a service-user that runs some cloud flows in the background. The service-user has access to all the data from the different BU. How do you handle this? Do you use a lookup to Business Unit in these tables?

Example: Send notification E-Mail to HR when the value of a column in Table x is changed.
E-Mail (Email) Business Unit (Lookup)
hr-west@cleantech.com Cleantech West
hr-east@cleantech.com Cleantech East

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