Environments, ALM and SharePoint

[danny90]

Hi all,

we have a small family company and I’ve been doing bits on pp for sometime.. little workflow apps etc.

im about to start building an app that starts to bring all these together and ultimately create our own fully fledged business tool 🔨 

There’s loads of bits just in the default environment at the moment so I’m going to leave them as is for now and create dev/test/prod environments and begin developing this app and start to get rid of the driftwood in the default overtime.

my question is, we use SharePoint kind of like a server. There’s a site which has document libraries in a structured format that holds all our business information, project information, you name it.. it’s in there. Everyone has accesss to the bits they need or all of it.

my questions are.. when I create these new environments, will I still be able to connect to sites in SharePoint for updating records, files etc? And would there be a better way to store all this information rather than SharePoint that the app will be able to connect to easily? 

the main area it needs to connect to is the project directory to create new folders automatically when new jobs are registered in the app.

hope that makes sense!

thanks,

Dan

[Jmanriquerios · Accepted solution]

Hi @danny90 

Congratulations on the benefit you are getting from the platform.

I will give you an answer focused on two scenarios, premium licensing and M365 licensing.

If you are going for a premium licensing model, using the 3 environments and an ALM strategy will be the best thing you can do to keep your applications evolving and securing them. In this sense, this gives you several possibilities and one of them is to have a synchronization with your Sharepoint site for the document management of your business process. Using a dataverse database you will have greater consistency in your data model, greater security and scalability of your data. My recommendation is always that you can go for this model.

In the case of maintaining an M365 licensing, you may have an ALM strategy but it is not complete because the data sources will be on a SharePoint site and unlike Dataverse, which will have one for each environment, at the Sharepoint level you would have to replicate three sites to be able to connect an environment to each sharepoint site. This can be tedious and laborious, because making a change in one site must be reproduced manually in the rest, unlike if you change a table in dev you can propagate it in the rest of the environments.

To give you an answer, if you can connect your environment(s) to the sharepoint site that you have, be it 1 or n applications, be it 1 or n environments, but imagine that you are developing some functionality and you have to test it and it only has the production site, you will be testing against production

I leave you this link to a recent publication on environmental governance

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jonathan-manrique-rios_develop-a-tenant-environment-strategy-to-activ...

[danny90]

Hi @Jmanriquerios 

Thank you for taking the time to respond to my post! Your comment is really useful.

So if I’m correct.. the application will be able to connect to the SharePoint site. and I can set this up in the dev and environment and when I export to to test and prod the connection will remain.

the problem you’re saying I’ll have is that if I’m dev/testing, I’ll be altering the data in the SharePoint site?

In my case, the data verse database will always be the original source of information hence the need for the ALM strategy to ensure the security of it.

the connections to our SharePoint site won’t be for retrieving data, only for quick functionalities like creating a new file in a job folder.

if, for the purpose of dev and testing.. I created a new directory in the SharePoint site and connected any flows in the new app to it. I could ensure the functionality then update the file path to its correct location and export for prod.

i could even do this in an imitative way by having a parameters page in the app which stores the file path in a data verse table and that can be edited in the production environment.

am I on the right lines here?

thanks!

Dan

[danny90]

Hi @Jmanriquerios 

Thank you for taking the time to respond to my post! Your comment is really useful.

So if I’m correct.. the application will be able to connect to the SharePoint site. and I can set this up in the dev and environment and when I export to to test and prod the connection will remain.

the problem you’re saying I’ll have is that if I’m dev/testing, I’ll be altering the data in the SharePoint site?

In my case, the data verse database will always be the original source of information hence the need for the ALM strategy to ensure the security of it.

the connections to our SharePoint site won’t be for retrieving data, only for quick functionalities like creating a new file in a job folder.

if, for the purpose of dev and testing.. I created a new directory in the SharePoint site and connected any flows in the new app to it. I could ensure the functionality then update the file path to its correct location and export for prod.

i could even do this in an imitative way by having a parameters page in the app which stores the file path in a data verse table and that can be edited in the production environment.

am I on the right lines here?

thanks!

Dan

[Jmanriquerios · Accepted solution]

Hi @danny90 

If you used Dataverse you have a big step gained in terms of your ALM. Now the connection to Sharepoint you can store the url of the connection in environment variables, and have the values ​​in each environment to the sharepoint site that you want to point to. That will help you have the data separated from the sharepoint repositories that you create. What you need to make sure is that repositories have the same schema so that Power Automate flows do what they should do.

There is also a native integration of Power Apps with Sharepoint and there what you must also pass is the URL of the Sharepoint repository and it is configured for each environment independently

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/admin/manage-documents-using-sharepoint

[danny90 · Accepted solution]

thanks @Jmanriquerios you have been a  massive help.

I've gone ahead and setup the environments and variables. really looking forward to progressing.

Thanks,

Dan

[Jmanriquerios]

Hi @danny90 

You're welcome, if you can give one or both of the answers that I have given you as accepted, since the one you have given is your own answer.