Who can create environments in Power Platform admin center?

• “Who can create environment(s) in Power Platform admin center?”
• “How can I restrict environment creation in Power platform admin center only to admins?

These are the questions that keep popping up in almost every other PowerApps training I conduct. While Power platform is pretty familiar, this is a topic which is still a grey area for quite a few.

How can you browse power platform admin center? A no-brainer question to anyone working on Power platform. Well, it’s https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com. And with that, it’s time for me to break a common myth – “Power platform admin centers can be accessed by only Office 365 admin, Dynamics 365 service admins or Power platform service admins”.

The word “admin” is the culprit here. It gives us a notion that it can only be accessed by “admins”. Well it’s not. Anyone having an appropriate license can visit the Power platform admin center. What they can do in there is a different topic of discussion altogether.

Now comes the second myth. “Only specified admins have the provision to create an Environment from Power platform admin center” – Well, the answer to this is – “it depends”. By default any user with appropriate license can create an environment in Power platform admin center. To check out which licenses are eligible to create an environment in Power platform admin center, visit this Microsoft Docs link.

I have logged in Power platform admin center with a user who have Dynamics 365 Customer engagement license. The user is a regular user in Office 365 and non-admin role in Dynamics 365.

As you can see from the above screenshot, the user is able to create a new CDS environment.

Now comes the next question – Is there no way to stop this? Whatever you have seen now is the default behavior. However the admin in-fact can control this behavior. And what is that feature? Well, a rather overlooked feature which certainly have some benefits – “Power Platform Settings“

In the Power platform admin center, click the “Gear” icon on the top right to open Power platform settings.

Click on Power platform settings to open the settings editor.

You have two options here – “Who can create production and sandbox environments?” and “Who can create trial environments?“. By default it is set to everyone and that explains why a regular user with a valid license is able to create an environment.

You however can choose to restrict environment creation to admins only by using the option – “Only specific admins”. Select that option and make sure to save the changes.

And below is the behavior when a non-admin user try to create an environment now.

The user can still login and browse the power platform admin center. You may still see the “NEW” option in place. But if the use try to create an environment, he will receive an error.

Hope this helps!

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Debajit Dutta
(Business Solutions MVP)