The Center of Excellence (CoE) Starter Kit is a comprehensive set of tools, templates, and best practices designed to help organizations establish governance, nurture innovation, and drive adoption of Microsoft Power Platform. Developed by Microsoft, this kit empowers organizations to gain visibility, enforce standards, and ensure the effective use of Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, and Power Virtual Agents.

By deploying the CoE Starter Kit, organizations can centralize management, monitor platform usage, and streamline app development processes. It serves as a foundation for implementing robust governance while enabling users to unlock the full potential of the Power Platform in a secure and sustainable way. Whether you’re just starting your journey or looking to scale, the CoE Starter Kit provides the tools you need to succeed in your digital transformation initiatives.

Building Blocks of the CoE Starter Kit

To achieve its purpose, the CoE Starter Kit is built around key building blocks that form the foundation for managing and scaling the Power Platform effectively:

1.      Governance

• Purpose: Establish rules and guidelines to ensure proper usage of the platform.
• Key Features:
  • Policies to maintain security and compliance.
  • Monitoring tools for detecting risky or unused apps and flows.
  • Processes for auditing and managing licenses and capacity.

2.      Nurturing Innovation

• Purpose: Empower makers to innovate while adhering to organizational best practices.
• Key Features:
  • Training and resources for enabling citizen developers.
  • Pre-built templates for common use cases.
  • Maker community support through tools like Microsoft Teams integration.

3.      Adoption and Scale

• Purpose: Promote platform adoption across departments and scale securely.
• Key Features:
  • Dashboards to visualize platform adoption trends.
  • Strategies for driving engagement through campaigns or events.
  • Standardized environments and templates for solution consistency.

Core Components of the CoE Starter Kit

The CoE Starter Kit is divided into modular components, making it adaptable to the specific needs of any organization. Here are the core components:

1.      Core Solution

The Core Solution is the backbone of the CoE Starter Kit, providing foundational capabilities to manage and monitor Power Platform environments.

Key Features:

• Environment Management: Centralize the monitoring of all environments, including production, sandbox, and developer instances.
• App and Flow Inventory: Maintain a real-time inventory of apps and flows across environments to understand usage trends.
• Admin Dashboards: Visualize data on platform usage, app performance, and license allocation.
• Compliance Rules: Automate compliance checks for naming conventions, security roles, and connectors.

2.      Governance Components

Governance components help organizations enforce policies and manage risks associated with platform usage.

Key Features:

• Connector Review: Monitor connector usage to identify and block unauthorized or high-risk connectors.
• Archiving Processes: Automatically archive unused or underutilized apps and flows after specified periods of inactivity.
• DLP (Data Loss Prevention) Policies: Ensure sensitive data remains secure by enforcing DLP policies across environments.

3.      Nurture Components

The Nurture module focuses

on empowering makers and fostering innovation while aligning with organizational standards.

Key Features:

• • Maker Welcome Email: Send automated emails to new makers with resources, best practices, and training opportunities.
  • Training and Templates: Provide pre-configured templates and resources to accelerate app and flow creation.
  • Community of Practice (CoP): Encourage collaboration through forums, Teams channels, and other shared spaces.

4.      Adoption and Innovation

This component is designed to drive platform engagement and ensure the organization maximizes its investment in the Power Platform.

Key Features:

• Adoption Dashboards: Track KPIs such as active users, app launches, and flow runs.
• Feedback Collection: Use Power Apps or Forms to gather user feedback on apps and flows to refine processes.
• Communication Campaigns: Share success stories and encourage broader adoption through newsletters or campaigns.

5.      Thematic Add-Ons

These optional add-ons address specific organizational needs:

• ALM (Application Lifecycle Management): Simplify the deployment and management of solutions across environments.
• Tenant-Level Analytics: Gain insights at the tenant level to manage licenses, storage, and more effectively.
• Power BI Integration: Enable in-depth reporting and analytics for governance and adoption trends.

How These Components Work Together

The CoE Starter Kit components are not isolated; they work together to create a cohesive and manageable ecosystem.

• Governance ensures control and compliance, while nurturing innovation enables makers to explore and build solutions confidently.
• Adoption tools amplify platform engagement, while analytics provide insights for informed decision-making.

Center of Excellence (CoE) Ending Notes

The Center of Excellence Starter Kit is more than just a tool—it’s a framework for success. By leveraging its building blocks and core components, organizations can achieve a balanced approach to governance, innovation, and adoption of the Microsoft Power Platform. Whether you’re just starting or scaling, the CoE Starter Kit provides the structure you need to unlock the full potential of your digital transformation initiatives.

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KAISPE, the leading provider of software solutions, has developed products that harness the power of AI-powered design, analysis, and insights. They help businesses save time, increase efficiency, and make better decisions. Meanwhile, Crayon’s global market coverage and extensive experience in software, cloud, data, and AI solutions make them the go-to partner for businesses looking to innovate and thrive. By partnering with KAISPE, Crayon is able to offer its customers access to a suite of powerful software products that can solve even the most complex business problems. Together, KAISPE and Crayon will help businesses identify the best software solutions for their unique needs and budget. So, they can achieve their goals and stay ahead of the competition.

Message shared by CEO KAISPE

“We are proud to collaborate with the world-renowned Crayon team to bring customers the best solutions and products available. With this powerful partnership in place, customers can now easily access KAISPE and Crayon’s joint offering, freeing them to focus their efforts on driving successful business outcomes.”, said Imran Mahmood, CEO KAISPE

Message shared by Crayon Management

“At Crayon, we are always on the lookout for ways to help our customers and partners to innovate and thrive. Our partnership with KAISPE allows us to offer our customers and partner eco-system access to a complete suite of powerful software solutions built on Microsoft Power Platform. It can be integrated with Azure machine learning, Dynamics 365 and IOT. These solutions can solve their most complex business challenges at an affordable price. We are excited to be working with KAISPE. And we believe this partnership will help businesses drive growth, streamline operations, and achieve their full potential. It is a simple, easy plug & play SaaS suite of solutions built on world’s leading enterprise low-code application platform-Microsoft Power Platform.”, said Arjan Oude Kotte, Strategic Partnerships & Channel Director – Crayon MEA

This partnership where KAISPE and Crayon join forces is a game-changer for businesses looking to drive innovation and growth. With KAISPE and Crayon on their side, organizations can be confident they have the right tools to succeed in today’s rapidly evolving business landscape.

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Introduction

It does not matter if you are a programmer, tester, or end user involved in application development. We will not release the application until we understand that all parts work together. Integration or end-to-end (E2E) testing. In fact, the only important test is the E2E test. This proves that the application can successfully complete the entire business transaction.

The problem is that you may have time to run one E2E test in one release, but you do not have time to repeat every E2E test every time you make a change to your application, or even in every release. At least, you do not have time to manually repeat those tests.

Therefore, here is how to integrate Test Studio into your testing process, including how to handle common problems that are part of using automated E2E regression testing tools.

Overview

Power Apps Test Studio is a low-code solution for creating, organizing and automating tests for canvas apps. In Test Studio, you can use Power Apps expressions to create tests, or you can use a recorder to save your app’s operations and automatically generate expressions. You can also play tests written within Test Studio to verify the functionality of your app, run tests in a web browser, or incorporate automated tests into your app’s deployment process.

Reference: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/maker/canvas-apps/test-studio

How does it work?

For this case study, I am going to use a sample application, which we created on Canvas app.

Steps

Before test cases creation, an error will be occurred. “Enable error management in your app”

To resolve the above error, Go to the app settings > Select the Upcoming features > in Experimental tab, enable the Formula-level error management.

Now click on the Open tests button.

In order to create Test cases, we have to create a Test suite in which all test cases are coming which is showing by default.

You can create multiple test cases in a suite and you can also add multiple suites based on your requirement.

Now click on Record button.

Process the steps for the first time manually and complete it.

After completion, the all action will be showing it which were performed manually.

On test case completion, now we need to publish it.

Note: Before publishing it, make sure that you have to Save the app for publishing.

Play test case

Now, click on Play button to start the test case process automation.

The negative record have been submitted through the automate process.

Watch this video to learn how to work with Test Studio

Knowns limitations
While work to provide full control coverage in Power Apps Test Studio is in progress, the following functionality is currently unavailable:

• Components
• Code components written in the Power Apps Component Framework.
• Nested galleries.
• Media controls.
• Formula-level error management experimental feature needs to be turned on for the app.
• Support for controls not listed in the Select and SetProperty
• Person-type columns.

Please share your kind feedback in the comments section. For any query, feel free to Contact us or email us on info@kaispe.com

View our other blogs.

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We will analyze email sentiments and key phrases from the email using AI Builder and sending results to MS Teams to track emails from customers, coworkers etc.

After each email, you can easily confirm whether the sentiment is positive or negative, and which key phrases they are using to focus, and you can reply to the email appropriately

Hopefully, this will help you how to respond to emails appropriately. If you want to find out more, please contact us at info@kaispe.com

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• Purchase Requisition Management
• Travel and Expense Management
• Training Management
• Loan Management
• Leave Management

At KAISPE, we pride ourselves on our innovation, expertise, and our continued commitment to ensuring delivery of the highest quality products to our customers. As a Microsoft Certified Partner, we provide solutions backed by industry best practices and standards. We are Microsoft Co-Sell partner and have strong presence on Microsoft marketplaces with our remarkable apps and services.

To learn more, visit https://testing.kaispe.com or call (315) 791-4472. Connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

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DynamicPoint’s mission is to save businesses money by delivering business apps that provide the greatest level of functionality and flexibility through the utilization of the Office 365 framework.

At KAISPE, we pride ourselves on our innovation, expertise, and our continued commitment to ensuring delivery of the highest quality products to our customers. As a Microsoft Certified Partner, we provide solutions backed by industry best practices and standards. We are Microsoft Co-Sell partner and have strong presence on Microsoft marketplaces with our remarkable apps and services.

To learn more, visit https://www.kaispe.com or call (315) 791-4472. Connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

The post KAISPE partners with DynamicPoint to deliver process automation solutions appeared first on KAISPE.

This shows our continuous commitment with customers to help them automate the business processes and achieve high operating efficiency with improved bottom line.

At KAISPE, we pride ourselves on our innovation, expertise, and our continued commitment to ensuring delivery of the highest quality products to our customers. As a Microsoft Certified Partner, we provide solutions backed by industry best practices and standards. We are Microsoft Co-Sell partner and have strong presence on Microsoft marketplaces with our remarkable apps and services.

To learn more, visit https://testing.kaispe.com or call (315) 791-4472. Connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

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At KAISPE, we have tried to use Power Automate and Common Data Service to automate Microsoft Dynamics 365 CE Product Management process. A typical scenario is the CRM administrator gets an updated product list (CSV or Excel) from back end ERP team as all the master data management is done over there. The administrator would like to update the CRM product catalog using such list.

Here is the demo to manage Product Catalog Management which includes update new Price Lists and create new Products and handle any unknown units and unit groups which leads to failed new products and send an email with Product Catalog Management report in PDF format.

So, first we have an email trigger to get an email with excel attachment contains updated, new and unknown units data.

In order to extract an email attachment data, we need to use one drive action for file creation and then we have used list of rows used present in a table action for data extraction.

Next, we have looped through all new products, updated and unknown units present in able to automate complete process in parallel with the help of CDS action.

In last, to create a Product Catalog Management report in PDF and send an email back to the administrator, we have used one drive to (create and convert file) actions in PDF format.

Here is a snapshot of a result we have got after the whole process completed:

Please feel free to contact us info@kaispe.com for product demo.

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