Power Platform Governance 2026: From the CoE Starter Kit to the Admin Center

For years, the CoE Starter Kit was the Swiss Army knife of Power Platform governance. Microsoft is now building these capabilities natively into the Power Platform Admin Center – with a clear focus on model-driven apps and AI agents. We break down the migration and show why this isn't just an admin topic, but something that directly affects your project work and your project & portfolio management (PPM).

The CoE Starter Kit has had its day – governance becomes a product

The Center of Excellence (CoE) Starter Kit was never an official product, but a collection of apps, flows and Power BI dashboards that each organization had to install, run and keep up to date itself. That is exactly what's changing now: Microsoft no longer actively maintains the kit – there are no new features, bug fixes or security patches. Instead, Microsoft is moving the core capabilities directly into the Power Platform Admin Center (PPAC) as native in-product experiences.

For platform owners, that's good news: governance stops being a self-built side project and becomes a maintained, supported platform capability. Anyone still running the CoE Starter Kit in production today should set up a migration plan towards PPAC.

The four native governance experiences in the Admin Center

The former CoE core tasks are now found in four areas of the Admin Center:

Inventory – a tenant-wide overview of all apps, flows and agents. The Inventory experience has replaced the old CoE inventory flows and shows canvas, model-driven, code and vibe apps, cloud flows as well as agents from Copilot Studio and the Microsoft 365 Copilot Agent Builder – including owners and the connectors used.

Usage – adoption data to identify top resources and their owners. Monitor – the operational health of heavily used resources. Actions – a central place to identify risks, enforce best practices and trigger governance measures.

Important for your permissions planning: these experiences require a tenant-wide admin role. Plain environment admins or end users won't see them.

Managed Environments, Security Hub and DLP as the foundation

Beneath the four experiences sits a foundation of Managed Environments, data loss prevention (DLP) policies and the Admin Center's security area. Managed Environments bundle security and monitoring capabilities at the platform level, letting you secure environments in a targeted way – from DLP policies and sharing limits to usage insights. The security area additionally provides recommendations to improve your security posture in a data-driven way.

In practice this means: governance is no longer a single dashboard, but a connected stack – inventory, usage, operations, actions and security all interlock.

Special focus: model-driven apps and AI agents

It gets interesting where Microsoft is investing most heavily in 2026: model-driven apps and generative AI. With the February 2026 update, Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat in model-driven apps entered public preview. Users can ask questions directly in the app, reason over in-app data and connect insights from documents and communications – without leaving the application. First-party agents such as Researcher and Analyst can be used alongside custom Copilot Studio agents.

On the governance side, it's cleanly designed: admins configure the feature per environment, makers then decide per app whether Copilot Chat is active. Control stays with the platform without slowing makers down.

In parallel, Microsoft is tightening agent governance. Planned or already rolling out: dedicated permissions for publishing agents and for channel access, risk signals during agent configuration rather than only after deployment, tracking of inactive or unpublished agents (e.g. unused for more than 90 days), monitoring of Entra App IDs against identity sprawl, and per-environment Copilot credit tracking with spend caps to contain cost exposure. An "Agentic Center of Enablement" is set to automate tenant monitoring and generate remediation plans with audit trails.

The common thread: AI is treated in the Power Platform not as a playground, but as a controlled, governed enterprise capability – inventoried, secured and budgeted like any other resource.

Why this is a PPM topic – two perspectives

At first glance this sounds like pure platform-admin material. In reality, this governance architecture determines how sustainable your project work on the Power Platform is. Two perspectives are worth taking.

Perspective 1: How do you deliver your own projects cleanly?

Many IT teams build their internal project, requirements or demand tools themselves – as canvas or model-driven apps on Dataverse, complemented by flows and increasingly by Copilot agents. This is exactly where the new governance becomes a tailwind: if you run your project app as a model-driven app in a Managed Environment, it automatically inherits Inventory, usage insights, DLP and the AI guardrails. Instead of securing every in-house build individually, you run within the same controlled framework.

Concretely, that shapes your architecture decisions: dedicated environments per lifecycle stage (Dev/Test/Prod), Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) via solutions, clear connector and DLP policies – and AI features you enable deliberately per app. Build this way and you don't have to retrofit governance; you use it as a foundation.

Perspective 2: A PPM solution for other departments – architecturally fitting

The second situation is at least as common: organizations run Microsoft Planner for lightweight teamwork and, in many places, still Project Online for classic PPM. As soon as other departments ask for "real" project and portfolio management, the architecture question arises: how do you offer a PPM solution that doesn't feel like an island but fits into the existing Microsoft governance?

The answer is close to what Microsoft is doing right now. Both Project for the web / Planner Premium and full-fledged PPM solutions such as Altus PPM or Projectum xPM run as model-driven apps on Dataverse. That puts them squarely in the governance stack the Admin Center now provides: they appear in the tenant-wide inventory, can be secured via Managed Environments, benefit from DLP and security recommendations – and can use Copilot Chat and Copilot Studio agents under the same guardrails as your other apps.

For IT leaders, that's a strong argument: a PPM solution on Dataverse isn't additional shadow IT, but a well-integrated building block within the same management and security model. That simplifies not only the migration away from Project Online, but also the conversation with data protection, security and license management.

Conclusion

Migrating the CoE Starter Kit into the Power Platform Admin Center is more than housekeeping: governance becomes a maintained platform capability, with a clear focus on model-driven apps and AI agents. Anyone who puts their project work and PPM on Dataverse and Managed Environments isn't building against this trend, but on top of it – gaining a governed PPM solution with control, security and future-readiness in one.

How Holert supports you with Power Platform governance

For exactly these tasks, we've put together our new package Power Apps Governance & Managed Services – either as a one-time governance setup or as an ongoing managed service. Holert supports IT and PMO teams in building sustainable Power Platform governance: from a governance assessment of the existing environment, through defining an environment and ALM strategy, setting up Managed Environments, DLP and security policies, to replacing the CoE Starter Kit with the native Admin Center experiences. We also define guardrails for model-driven apps and Copilot/AI agents – from permissions and credit limits to ongoing monitoring.

On this foundation, we set up governed PPM solutions such as Altus PPM or Projectum xPM on Dataverse so that they fit cleanly into your existing Microsoft architecture – including migration from Project Online and integration with Planner. Learn more on the Power Apps Governance & Managed Services page. Whether a one-time assessment, a migration roadmap or ongoing support: get in touch via our contact form, and we'll find the right starting point together.