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Help with figuring out licensing

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Posted on by JMGCORNATOR

Hello there,

My organisation has been working for a little while with PowerApps. The organisation has a PowerApps license through our Office 365. So far, it has been sufficient to work within our default environment and obtain data using an On-premise gateway and SQL-connector. However, as we offer Dynamics NAV we want to use the Odata-feed functionality as we have done with Power Bi (Works great for us). The majority of our customers have local databases.

I have questions that I dont seem to be able to answer using Microsoft documents found on the web, and I have been reading a ton of documents at this point (seems like making usefull explanations is not of high concern to Microsoft).

Anyways, PowerApps use rights with Office 365, I have no access to CDS, meaning that I have no database capacity. Consequently, I cannot create a production environment. I have created an trial environment, but if I want to convert into a production environment i need at least 1GB of free storage capacity - An obvious limitation of our PowerApps license. I have read that it is possible to buy add-on capacity. So my questions are:

Is it possible to buy data capacity and link is to our current license and if so, where do i buy it?
If thats not possible, I guess I can buy a per app or per user license? - But will I be able to create production environments and use CDS with these?
From Microsofts license guide, the per user-license provides 250MB of datacapacity. As i am still new to PowerApps, this sounds a little scarce to me. Is considered to be a large capacity? If I need 1GB just to make an production environment in which i can use Odata-feed, do I really need to buy 4 per user licenses?
Using the Odata-feed functionality, it seems that I must read in my Odata-feed as an entity. Does this mean that i will be storing the data in CDS?

Hope some of you can help me!

Cheers!

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Building Power Apps

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Pstork1 68,707 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Let me clarify one thing. The "seeded" license included with PowerApps doesn't give you access to the premium CDS connectors, so you can't use CDS as a database. That does not mean that you don't have a CDS database and a production environment. Office 365 licensing includes a default production environment. If you have also created trial environment then that may be the limit of what you can create. Also, if you are working with a "trial" license then you won't be able to create a production environment since trial licenses are restricted from creating environments. If you won't be using CDS as a database, which requires additional licensing, then you can create additional environments in the PowerPlatform admin center. Just make sure that you leave the Create Database toggle set to 'No'. In general if you aren't using CDS as a database you won't need additional capacity even if you want multiple environments. If you do plan to use CDS as a database then you will need additional licensing no matter what. Here's how to create an environment without a database.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/admin/create-environment#create-an-environment-without-a-database

For your other questions

1) Yes you should be able to buy additional capacity. It should be available in the subscription page of your tenant. But with just Office 365 licensing you shouldn't need it.

2) Both a Per App and Per User license will give you access to CDS as a database. Remember these are both still licensed per user so you will need one additional license for every user who uses the app. That will probably provide the capacity you need for additional environments with CDS.

3) As mentioned every user needs a license, even with the per app model. Since you get 250MB on top of your default for every license you shouldn't have a problem.

4) To the best of my knowledge there is no out of the box OData connector. You can use OData to create a custom connector. But custom connectors require premium licensing so to use them you will need per app or per user licensing for everyone anyway.

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JMGCORNATOR 50 on at

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Hi @Pstork1 ,

Thanks for your answer.

Every employee in our organisation have a powerapps license under our Office 365 tenant. I am aware of not having access to premium connectors, however it was my understanding that we needed to use CDS - So thanks for clarifying that👍

Regarding capacity, check below picture - Sorry that it is danish language. essentially, what it says is that we have zero capacity for database, file and log:
Further more, i have tried setting "create databse" to "no" but i still get an error, as seen below, telling me that i need 1GB free capacity:
So this i why i am interested in knowing "where" i need that capacity and thought that it was in CDS. Could this be the reason that i cannot create an additional environment?

Regarding Question 2: Just to make sure - if i have purchased a license, say Per App, every person that i want share this app with needs to have a equal license?

Regarding Question 4: Having created an trial environment lasting 30 days i entered "entities" and "get data". Here i found an Odata connector.

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Pstork1 68,707 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Yes, if you get a perApp license then you have to buy a per App license for every user you share the app with. PerApp licenses are specific to each App so just having a perApp license isn't enough if its not for that particular app.

The Entities menu entry is used to import data from other data sources into CDS. The Odata connector you are seeing there is essentially a custom connector that you are configuring on the fly to do the import. That would definitely require additional licensing.

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Pstork1 68,707 Most Valuable Professional on at

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This FAQ may also help in answering some of your questions and provide more detail.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/admin/capacity-storage#faq

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JMGCORNATOR 50 on at

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@Pstork1 - This is really helping me out. I have been scratching my head over this, so THANKS a lot!

Based on what you have explained me, it seems like we do not need per app or per user licenses.

If i want to use our seeded license, i can access the default environment or an trial environment and make apps✔️.

Let say, that i want to create an additional production environment. Based on what you have explained to me, i should have no problem doing this. I tried deleting the previous mentioned trial environment, but i am not still not able to make a new production environment due to less than 1GB storage as shown in the pictures above.

Do you have any knowledge og suggestions for this?

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Pstork1 68,707 Most Valuable Professional on at

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If you are on a Trial license then there is some limitation on building additional environments based on the license itself. But if you are on a regular Office 365 license then you should be able to build a new environment without CDS even if your database capacity doesn't have 1GB. I can't explain why its not working for you. The whole capacity thing is quite new and some of the checks and balances may not work as expected. About the only thing you can do is open a service call. They may tell you you need to buy more capacity, but based on the documentation that shouldn't be necessary when creating an environment without a database.

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JMGCORNATOR 50 on at

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@Pstork1

Okay, thank you so much - its been very helpfull!

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Community Power Pla... on at

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Did you resolve your error that said "Creating an environment requires at least 1 GB of database capacity"? We have the same issue and need to know what we need to purchase, if anything. FAQs and internet searches haven't revealed anything helpful. Thanks.

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Community Power Pla... on at

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I am also having this issue of not being able to create an environment without a database. Anyone who has figured it out - it would be greatly appreciated to hear your solution.

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JMGCORNATOR 50 on at

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Hi Sbb,
Depending on your license you have different options for establishing new environments

Have a look at the table in this https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/admin/create-environment

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