The Power Platform Centre of Excellence Starter Kit represents one of the most comprehensive toolsets to help administrators. Chances are you’ve heard of the CoE Starter Kit before as it’s been around a while. You may only have theoretical knowledge of it, or you may have done countless installs & analysis like Michael & I have. Either way, we hope there’s something for everyone across this 2-parter.
One might consider it brave to write articles about the CoE Starter Kit, given its constantly evolving state. But we like a challenge, and the challenge from here will be keeping our articles updated for you.
There’s a lot to unpack in this article, so let’s get to it.
The Power Platform Centre of Excellence Starter Kit contains a set of solutions, components & tools built by the Microsoft Power CAT team. It’s to help organisations with the admin, governance & management of their Power Platform estate, as well as support wider adoption and best practice. The kit was first introduced back in 2019, if you go back as far as I do with the kit you’ll know how much it’s grown since.
At a very high level, the CoE kit contains:
1- Numerous Power Automate flows that collects data about your Power Platform estate.
2- Additional Power Automate flows that automate some administrative tasks, such as environment provisioning.
3- A collection of pre-built canvas & model-driven apps for you to use to monitor & take action.
4- Some Power BI reports for you to configure and provide rich analytics on your Power Platform estate.
It’s worth mentioning that there’s nothing crazy in the kit that you can’t build yourself. But, if someone else has done it for you then happy days!
What it isn't
The flipside of such a comprehensive kit is that some organisations think it’s a silver bullet for addressing ALL of your Power Platform needs.
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It isn’t
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The CoE Starter Kit can’t automatically sort out your environment strategy.
It won’t resolve your Power Platform licensing pains for you (though if you can create a tool that does, you’ll be a millionaire).
It isn’t going to magically make all your Power Platform problems disappear.
It’s also not going to tie your shoelaces or make you coffee.
The clue is in the name – STARTER kit. It’s a starting point, a foundation. The kit will consolidate all your tenant-wide Power Platform information, but it’s up to you and your organization to decide how you’ll act on that data. That’s the KEY and will determine how successful a CoE Starter Kit installation is for you.
The final “What it isn’t” is… it’s not perfect. You see, this isn’t a typical Microsoft product that’s included in your normal user licensing, like Outlook, SharePoint or Teams. It’s not in the waffle menu when you’re using Microsoft 365. A team of people at Microsoft might be managing it, but it’s very much a “community-type” project.
How do I get it?
A new version of the CoE Starter Kit gets released every month, normally in the 1st week of the new month. Everything about the kit is available here. As a starting point, it’s worth reading all the content on that page. It’s important to know how things are set up and the ways you can interact with the team.
All current and previous versions of the CoE Starter Kit are available on GitHub, accessible here. You can get notified when a new release is available. Follow the instructions shown here to set it up.
Remember above when I said we can help with the ongoing development? We can do that in the same GitHub area too. You can view all current issues with the Kit here, you’re free to create any new ones you find too. You can use the same area to ask the team questions, post new ideas or even help fix a few issues! Don’t be afraid to get involved 😊.
To download a release, you’ll need to scroll to the bottom of each release to the Assets section. Each solution is available individually, or as a complete package. The latter is what we’ll be focusing on for the purpose of the articles. Click on your selection to start the download.
Pre-requisites
There’s quite a few things you’ll need before you start installing your first CoE Starter Kit solution. All of this is extensively broken down here in the Microsoft Learn pages, the TLDR version with relevant links is below.
Infrastructure
1- Create two environments: one for a test version, the other for a production version (here, additional info here).
2- Implement a dedicated Power Platform Data Loss Prevention policy to cover both environments (here, plus extra help here).
3- Ensure that no other DLP policies are covering these environments.
4- Install the Creator Kit in both environments (here).
Identity & licenses
As instructed here, create a Service account and assign it the following licenses:
1- Microsoft 365 user license.
2- Power BI Premium license (unless the M365 user license is an A5 or E5, in which case it’s PBI is included).
3- Power Apps Premium license (non-trial).
4- Power Automate Premium license (non-trial).
Yes, it’s a bit annoying that you now need both a Power Apps Premium and Power Automate Premium. Anyway, ensure the account is mail-enabled to receive CoE-related alerts. You can enable MFA for this account so long as MaxAgeMultiFactor is set to Until-Revoked (here, plus extra help here). However, please note that enabling PIM for this account will hinder the CoE Starter Kit processes, so it’s advisable to avoid it (here).
Comms
3 x email-enabled security groups for collaboration (here).
Optional
If you’d like some audit information to flow from the Office 365 Management API, such as unique users and app launches, you’ll need 1 x Azure App Registration (here).
Not so optional
Good knowledge of Power Apps & Power Automate.
Patience.
Anything else?
Yep, couple of things:
1- Don’t install the CoE Starter Kit in the Default environment!
2- See point 1.
Secondly, Microsoft’s documentation is well thought out. It might not always be 100% up to date for every area but it’s close. My advice would be to bookmark this link, then become familiar with the left-hand menu:
What's in the box?
When you export the CoEStarterKit.zip, there’s quite a lot of content to install. Some of these components are optional depending on your needs so have provided links to each part. It’s important for you to strategise what you want to install and enable.
Core Components
This is, erm, the core part of the CoE Starter Kit 😀. It contains over 100 flows, many of which will be responsible for routinely scanning your estate for Power Platform assets to update Dataverse tables. There are a handful of apps available too, largely focused on the Power Platform admins.
Once you have this solution installed, you’ll walk through a handy setup wizard. When done, you can configure a couple of Power BI dashboards. There are 2 methods to collect data; depending on which one you use will dictate whether you need to configure the BYODL dashboard or the Production dashboard. The Governance dashboard is compatible with either approach.
You need to set up Core Components first, then set up the Power BI dashboards. If you install & configure nothing else, just do these bits.
Once those are set up, you can choose to set up some additional core functionality. These are optional:
Capacity alerts & welcome emails
Environment request management
Admin Command Centre
Collect audit logs
There’s lots of good reading here too, about some of the key parts of Core Components and how to use them. Take time to read this one so you get familiar with what’s on offer.
Install tips
In the CoE Starter Kit.zip from GitHub you’ll find the Core Components solution. The related article in Microsoft documentation is Set up inventory components. 
Once the solution is installed, you’ll be using the CoE Setup and Upgrade Wizard app:
You lucky people. Back in the day, all the setup was manual. This setup app is brilliant and does a lot of heavy lifting for you.
There’s a couple of things to remember when installing Core Components:
1- If it’s your first time installing the CoE Kit in a new environment, the Admin | Sync Template v4 (Driver) flow will take a while to run. This flow is like the conductor of the CoE orchestra; this runs first then triggers the rest of the sync flows thereafter.
You can access the flow run from the setup wizard. There’ll be a Delay step with a randomly generated number in, that’s how many minutes it’s going to wait before everything else proceeds. In the example below, 237 minutes is nearly 4hrs.
You’ll likely have to wait until the next working day until data starts to get collated and show in the tables.
2- When setting up your test instance, make sure to set this value to No in the setup wizard:
3- You don’t have to monitor everything if you don’t want or need to. During the setup of Core Components you can choose to only focus on a subset of environments. Detailed information is available in the FAQ & Tips section of the documentation.
Audit components
This solution contains assets to help govern your Power Platform estate. It provides admins visibility of what solutions makers are creating, and centralizes compliance management.
You must have Core Components done before you can embark on installing this. You can get cracking on audit components after that. Make sure you follow this fully, including the setup of approval tables before you install the audit components solution.
There’s some pretty good functionality you can set up once done, these are:
Developer Compliance processes: Helps detect apps & flows and allow makers to provide additional information.
Inactivity processes: Helps you set up inactivity notifications for unused apps & flows.
Microsoft Teams governance processes: Helps to monitor creation of Dataverse for Teams environments.
Cleanup of orphaned resources: Helps identify objects where a maker has left the organization & asks managers to maintain permissions.
App quarantine components: Helps manage quarantined apps if they’re not compliant.
For a deeper understanding of the audit components, check out this link.
Install tips
When you import & kick off the Audit Components solution, at the top of the screen it will reference ‘Governance Components’. These are the same thing.
Governance components is also referred to in the documentation, again it’s referring to the Audit components.
Nurture components
This solution contains resources you can use in your organization to promote adoption and usage of the tools. You’ll need to install Core Components before you can get this one sorted.
The set up guide is available here. It includes instructions for the video hub, training in a day, maker assessments and more. Take the time to evaluate what you will & won’t need to set up. If you don’t need any of these now, you might do later on so can set up whenever needed.
For more information on how to use the nurture components, go here.
Innovation backlog
Do you have an internal team who are responsible for building larger Power Platform solutions? If so, how do you capture & evaluate ideas?
If you’re struggling for a tool, the innovation backlog solution will be handy. Anyone from the business can add their idea including pain points, financial implications, and other key details. Anyone else in the business are able to upvote ideas too, which is cool.
This solution doesn’t rely on any other parts of the CoE Starter Kit, so you can install and use independently. Unlike the rest of the kit, there is a Dataverse for Teams install option for those facing licensing challenges. If you’re Power Apps Premium’d up to the max, you can install into a production environment.
Is it the prettiest app in the world? Nope. It’s functional though does help to collate & visualise pressing ideas that’ll form future Power Platform projects. Additionally, it can help identify builds that requestors could handle themselves or serve as a topic for a future internal hackathon.
Once it’s installed, you can refer to this for how to use it. Still wish they’d let Kristine redesign the UI/UX though 😉.
Admin tasks
This has recently become one of my favourite solutions in the CoE Starter Kit. The components are great for truly understanding workload for a Power Platform admin.. It can help identify opportunities to automate, bottlenecks or additional resource demand.
The last part is so important. As we know, administrators for SQL, Azure, Microsoft 365 and other areas are well-known. Some organisations have multiple people in these roles, such is the understanding of their importance. They also have their own dedicated Microsoft Certifications paths.
For the average Power Platform admin, it’s different. It’s usually a set of tasks inherited by the person “lucky” enough to know the most about the Power Platform. But, there’s no real understanding of how involved the role is. IT’S MASSIVE! So, the Admin Tasks components might go a little way to help spread some understanding. Setup steps are available here, with understanding of how to use the components here. There’s a sample questions extract you can upload or you can add your own, or choose a mix of both. This solution doesn’t rely on any other CoE Starter Kit components either.
ALM Accelerator
The ALM Accelerator solution is also independent of any other CoE Starter Kit components. It’s so independent in fact, it has its own area in the documentation.
This solution can support healthy Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) for your Power Platform solutions. There’s a canvas app front end that will sit on top of, and interact with your Azure Pipelines & Git source control. You can find out more information about the ALM Accelerator for Power Platform here. To go ahead and configure, you’ll want to start here. Once set up, you’ll need to work through the various deployment settings, starting here.
This can be a bit fiddly, especially if you’re not familiar with Azure DevOps. Persevere as the end goal is useful if you want a nice interface over your full-fat ALM pipelines.
If you’re planning on using Managed Environments, Power Platform pipelines are a lot easier to get up and running.
Upgrading the kit
If you want to keep your CoE Starter Kit installs healthy, you’ll need to update it regularly. New versions are available every month on GitHub for you to download.
As per Microsoft recommendations, try to update the solutions at least every 3 months. If you leave it longer, you have the following options:
1- Download each month’s solutions & upgrade them retrospectively.
This sometimes works, though have seen it being troublesome on occasion, OR
2- Create a new environment to do a fresh install.
Not so great if you’ve shared a bunch of apps/reports as everything will have new URLs.
You can find the update instructions here. They include important steps for a successful update, such as checking for unmanaged layers.
My advice to clients has always been this: be wary of updating the solutions the minute they’re available. Give it a week or so, and keep an eye on the issues log. Have a keen eye on anything created recently that might impact your installs and/or components you’ve enabled. If you are keen to update straight away, make sure to use your test instance first so you can identify anything problematic. If you do, make sure to raise it as an issue for others to be aware of.
Extending the kit
As we said at the beginning of the article, the CoE Starter Kit isn’t a silver bullet. It will collect lots of data for you, and provide you and your makers tools to interact with that data. But what if there’s something you need that isn’t in the kit?
Firstly, don’t forget you can make a feature request in GitHub!
If you want to start extending away, here’s some things to consider.
1- Microsoft cover extending & customizing the CoE Starter Kit. Please do read this first.
2- Don’t edit any of the CoE Starter Kit contents. You might create unmanaged layers that will hinder future updates.
3- If you need to delete the environment for whatever reason, make sure you export any of your custom work first.
4- A lot of the CoE Starter Kit uses Dataverse as a backend. If you want makers to interact with the tools, they’ll need the relevant Power Platform licensing. This will include use of any custom extensions built against the same data/tables.
5- It’s not uncommon to build flows to sync/move data from CoE tables to a cost & license friendly data source. This is an alternative option for things you want to build or replicate if you can’t afford a huge license spike yet.
Installing and updating the CoE Starter Kit is the easy part, but what happens next? In our next article, we’ll dive deeper into using the data to gain insights and support strategies. We’ll also look at options for extending in more detail.
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This article is fantastic! Thank you SO much. I’ve installed the CoE in one tenant and am going to install in another tenant for a client of mine. Updating the CoE isn’t too bad, but installing it for the first time is intimidating to some degree. This is super helpful.
You’re welcome, Beth! Glad it was helpful
Hi,
How can we install CoE starter kit dedicatedly at sub-tenant level e.g for different departments of an organization and manage the accesses .
Hi, you’d probably have to have multiple installs in each sub-tenant and use the Admin View app to allow/exclude specific environments for each level. Alternatively, you could customise the Power BI reports with row level security to target specific users.