The writing was on the wall for quite some time. Now, it’s also on the official docs in MS Learn: The Power Platform CoE Starter Kit is no longer actively maintained.

We already saw how the monthly releases of the Kit stopped in February 2026. This was a clear enough signal for me to write my farewell post to the CoE Starter Kit on LinkedIn last week.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of this project for what Power Platform came to be. The inevitable closure of the chapter deserves a bit of a retrospective before we move to talking about how life will go on. In this issue I’ll talk about my personal encounter with the CoE Starter Kit and how the current tooling offered by Microsoft compares to what the Kit delivered over the years.

I jumped head-first into the nascent low-code business in 2020, leaving my CRM career behind. I imagined this would have meant I’d get my hands dirty building plenty of new apps and flows. Instead, it became clear that the biggest question holding customers back from embracing Power Platform wasn’t about whether the required apps could technically be created. It was all about how all these new apps built by citizen developers and different MS partners could be governed.

Someone in our team had to focus on it, and so I became the governance guy. It must be over six years now from when I first deployed an internal version of the CoE Starter Kit. I had read about what you could do with it in theory, so now it was time to learn how to use it in practice. Let me tell you, it was a lot to chew on. Getting the basic building blocks in place took a few days — understanding how they actually worked took years.

At around 2021-2022, the Kit was exploding with new features through new monthly releases. Just the core solutions doubled in size when looking at the number of artifacts. This was in addition to all the changes and enhancements in every monthly release. Keeping up with the CoE Starter Kit literally had to be a major part of your job, otherwise you’d have a tough time figuring out A) if the solution was working, and B) if not, where to look for troubleshooting the deployment.

In 2023, my CoE Starter Kit by the numbers slide read as follows:

This was both amazing and scary. Amazing as in how a tiny team at Microsoft was able to ship such an extensive set of features to plug the gaps in admin and governance tooling available in native Power Platform product features. Scary in the sense that if you did not take the time to learn how to deploy and manage CoE Starter Kit, you were pretty much flying blind. You had no way of monitoring what your app makers were building.

Okay, sure, there was the tenant-level analytics feature. A pre-packaged Power BI report embedded inside PPAC, giving you some visibility into Power Apps and Power Automate artifacts. Assuming your admin had enabled the feature. It was better than nothing, yet in practice every single governance related engagement with customers started with these questions: “Do you have the CoE Starter Kit deployed? If yes, when did you last update/check it? If not, here’s the prerequisites we need to go through before touching anything else.”

Fast forward to Ignite 2025. The session Overview of managed solutions and secure ops in Power Platform touched on CoE at around the 12 minute marker. Ryan Jones asked the audience "How many of you have deployed the Center of Excellence Starter Kit today? … How many of you use that for inventory? … How many of you like doing that?" He then pivoted to the pitch: inventory now shows up natively in the Power Platform Admin Center (apps, agents, automations in a few clicks), and the same data is also queryable via Azure Resource Graph / KQL.

Today, when you open PPAC, you may well see a bubble saying “Welcome to Power Platform Inventory”. You will land on a list of Power Platform resources that allows searching, filtering, and some lightweight column customization. The feature set is not particularly broad, but considering how hard things used to be for the first 8 years of Power Platform, an up-to-date view of resources across environments is a major step forward.

Getting the inventory data into the CoE Starter Kit environment was the majority of the battle the MS team maintaining it had to fight. Since no built-in API existed for easily reading the data across different artifact types, the result was an elaborate maze of sync flows that ran on a daily basis. It’s amazing how well they worked, considering the complexity — yet inevitably the inventory flows sometimes failed. As the products and APIs changed, you always had to keep an eye on the inventory data collection mechanism. And keep your CoE solutions up to date, too.

Then there was the part that made this especially challenging for larger orgs. Neither Power Automate cloud flows nor the admin connectors were designed to scale into capturing a million apps from the tenant. SMB customers could live within the practical boundaries of the CoE sync flows. Enterprise orgs had to build custom solutions to get a complete picture of their low-code assets.

There were several rounds of attempts made to address this issue. Already in May 2021, when the telemetry data export to Azure Data Lake was announced, the team created a plan to re-platform the CoE Starter Kit to use Bring Your Own Data Lake capability instead of cloud flows. Unfortunately, the product side didn’t move as quickly as expected and the experimental BYODL feature took almost two years to launch.

Better late than never, right? Not in this case. The capability with the Data Lake export never became reliable or comprehensive enough to replace the sync flows architecture. In addition to the data coverage never reaching parity, a major problem was how the planned architecture relied on Power Platform Dataflows. There never were sufficient investments in making them truly work with solutions, which was a huge issue for something like the CoE Starter Kit to ship them as part of their managed solutions. They ended up becoming just another dead feature on the platform.

The configuration wizard and the whole deployment and update process of the CoE Starter Kit evolved quite dramatically over the years, though. Whereas in 2020 the setup was a huge manual process (especially before connection references became a thing), a few years later there was a proper product-grade UX for configuring all the basic moving parts of the CoE solution. Canvas-based experiences were replaced with model-driven apps and custom pages, leveraging the Fluent UI controls in the Creator Kit.

So, we now have the raw inventory data natively available, via PPAC and via API. That’s a good first step in establishing basic visibility into what exists at this point in time. It’s hardly enough for operational governance of a low-code platform though. What else do we have in the product side now?

Let’s look at what Microsoft says about how core CoE Starter Kit scenarios map to PPAC features:

Usage data is certainly important to identify high-volume apps, flows and agents. That was always tricky with the Kit, so do we now have a way to combine that with inventory items? No, we just have a separate dashboard in PPAC, with zero filters to analyze the data. No documented API support as of now.

Monitor. Hey, that’s a topic I’ve written about before! As I couldn’t believe how unreliable the built-in feature was, I actually started monitoring the Monitor myself. Today, I’m happy to report that the daily alert emails have finally been rock solid in 2026. If you’re happy with 24h aggregates and don’t need same-day monitoring for critical processes, the PPAC features can certainly be useful

Actions. I can’t be the only one who sees this list as mostly an advertisement for enabling security features that Microsoft has introduced into the platform. Many of them are of course relevant to people who are in charge of improving the security posture of business apps, automations and agents in the tenant. Technically valid topics to review, yet not exactly the only list of tasks for Power Platform governance in practice.

Is there something more coming for helping platform owners and admins address the day-to-day governance needs? At Ignite 2025, the Virtual CoE, as in “Virtual Center of Enablement”, was presented. It never was in public preview, despite the badges on the slides, and I never bothered to sign up for the private preview with NDA clauses.

In the 2026 Release Wave 1 plans, the feature has now been given the agent branding and announced as Agentic Center of Enablement (Agentic CoE). Scheduled to arrive in preview in May and GA in June, it appears to have identical contents as the Ignite 2025 slide. A set of three “guardian agents” that are supposed to answer the questions:

These are of course very relevant questions, and I’m sure a modern LLM can provide very detailed and convincing summaries from the firehose of raw data that the inventory API now offers. This also explains why Microsoft hasn’t built a new dashboard experience in PPAC for summarizing the data via classic Power BI visuals. No doubt the guardians will require Managed Environments to be enabled.

Microsoft has been building the managed platform story for a while now. It makes a lot of sense, especially now when Power Platform must be able to answer the “why not just vibe code everything” question in a credible way. Initially launched as more of a concept rather than actual software functionality, Managed Environments has become the premium umbrella covering basically every new admin and governance feature launched.

In the preview version of PPAC, we can see placeholder dashboard tiles on several “Insights about Managed Environments” metrics coming soon. In a way, PPAC is gradually turning into the built-in equivalent of what the CoE Starter Kit Power BI dashboards were in 2020.

Except for the customizability part. And that’s a huge thing for anyone that needs to do more than just look at the preconfigured admin experiences. Because even though the experience of managing Power Platform with tooling built on/inside Power Platform was at times a confusing inception moment, the potential with this type of architecture is very hard for any Microsoft product feature to match:

It all comes down to what the low-code solutions built on Dataverse, Power Apps and Power Automate are great at: managing business processes. The very moment you need to go from observing the current state to mapping your journey towards the to-be state, the inevitable question is: “okay, where should we track this data and tasks?”

I won’t pretend that it was ever an easy thing to extend the CoE Starter Kit. Back in my previous company, we contemplated many times on whether to create our own productized layers on top of what CoE shipped. It would have technically been the right way to proceed. In practice, the evolving nature of CoE meant that taking any hard dependencies on these solutions would have incurred a sizeable administration tax. Partners often need to do that on top of formal Microsoft products — but the Kit was no product.

The thing is, even the CoE Starter Kit was built from the assumption that what matters is tracking the usage of Microsoft’s services. Yet that’s not what really matters to customer orgs. They use elements like Power Apps and Power Automate to assemble Real Business Applications. Those applications live in multiple environments, have dependencies to multiple platform components, external systems and processes, and so on. None of this is modelled in the CoE Starter Kit out of the box.

The above slide is taken from my Update Days Power Platform 2026 session on inventory management. I will be talking about this in detail in the upcoming Perspectives Deep Dive 02 session, but in short: inventory items need to be translated into business app catalog items to become truly governable. Microsoft offers no tooling or even concepts in the Power Platform that would map to this business reality.

Despite these gaps, a key benefit of the CoE Starter Kit was that for the first mile of inventory data management there was a common pattern publicly available. In hindsight, it might have been better if the solution had remained a more narrow Starter Kit, rather than evolving into a big admin and governance toolkit. Because in practice, the apps on top of the CoE database were rarely adopted, but blurred the lines of what customers were expected to build on their own.

Today, the starting point is the inventory API. We’ve gone to the other extreme by not having any example templates available for how that raw data can be connected to real-life governance processes. The managed platform layer with its guardian agents is unlikely to be extendable. Which means customers are left with asking their Copilot “how do we build something that looks a bit like the CoE Starter Kit but from the inventory API data”?

It would be sweet if there was a fork of the Kit’s repo that took the useful bits and lessons learned, but replaced the sync flows with some data platform tooling compatible with the modern API approach. That would reduce the need for everyone to reinvent the wheel and get to value faster. Not to mention making it easier for cross-organization collaboration to take place in the community and allow sharing tips and tricks on governance tools and practices.

Creating such a fork would be relatively easy for Microsoft, given what we’ve seen the Power CAT team deliver over the years. The main challenge here would be how to tie it back to the organizational goals of Microsoft today: meaning, “how does Copilot benefit from this investment?” This is particularly problematic, given a separate Copilot Studio Kit already exists.

With its specific focus on agents, the data sources and collection methods of the Copilot Studio Kit are different than what CoE used. There’s a “One Inventory mode” that combines data from the classic Power Platform admin connectors and Dataverse table queries with the Azure Resource Graph API providing agent specific details. CoE only covered the Dataverse side of what used to be Power Virtual Agents bots, so the coverage is much broader with this modern approach.

And yet not even the Copilot Studio Kit is safe in terms of its future. Managed Environments was the commercial story that ended up killing the CoE Starter Kit, thanks to its connection with the premium Power Apps/Automate licensing model. Now, as Microsoft Agent 365 went GA on May 1st and is sold at $15/user/month, the incentives for building a non-productized governance kit have basically evaporated. Maintenance may not end immediately but the days are numbered for the Copilot Studio Kit, too.

What’s the takeaway for customers from all this? I see it as another reminder that the focus and priorities of your business solutions must outlive those of the vendor’s. When it comes to the adoption of the latest services, one can expect there to be plenty of Microsoft support resources available to onboard customers for the shiny new tech. Yet that shouldn’t be confused with the permanent state of things. It’s critical to take true ownership of your digital tools and build sufficient competence + processes to remain in charge of the systems built for running your business — even after the technology no longer occupies the keynote stage at tech conferences.