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 – and the June 2026 feature update raises the bar further with connector governance and AI guardrails. 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 and no bug fixes anymore, and reported issues are no longer addressed either. 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 soon – the kit keeps working, but without further development it is heading for a technical dead end.

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.

New in June 2026: connector transparency and Advanced Connector Policies

The June 2026 update makes governance noticeably sharper. Since early June, the Inventory captures every connector and every connector operation in use in public preview – across canvas and model-driven apps, cloud flows, agent flows and agents. A new connector column appears in all Inventory grids for this, including the resource-specific views under Power Apps, Power Automate and Copilot Studio. No opt-in is required – the data flows in automatically.

This changes day-to-day practice: in the event of a connector deprecation, a security incident or a changed licensing tier, you can determine within seconds which resources are affected. The same data is also available programmatically – via the Power Platform for Admins V2 connector, the Inventory API and Azure Resource Graph – turning tenant-wide analyses into a single query.

In parallel, Advanced Connector Policies (ACP) are now generally available. With them, you can no longer only allow or block a connector as a whole, but control which specific actions and MCP servers within a connector may be used by apps and AI tools – an important building block as soon as agents reach out to external services.

New in July 2026: MCP governance for agent tools

Copilot Studio, Microsoft 365 Copilot and coding agents increasingly connect to internal systems and partner tools through a single standard: the Model Context Protocol (MCP). In the July 2026 update on Dataverse as the agent data platform, Microsoft tightens governance around this growing MCP landscape: with Bring Your Own MCP (BYO MCP), organizations can register their own internal MCP servers – for proprietary systems or line-of-business applications – and run them under the same governance rules as the official MCP catalog: with admin approval, visibility and central control. In parallel, MCP certification for ISVs and partners creates a trusted route into the Microsoft ecosystem, so certified partner MCPs become discoverable, vetted and usable in a governed way across Copilot Studio and Azure AI Foundry.

In governance terms, this closes a gap that Advanced Connector Policies alone don't cover: it's no longer just about which connector actions an agent may use, but also about which self-hosted or partner-built MCP servers are permitted as tools for agents in the first place. If you run PPM solutions or your own agents on Dataverse and plan to connect them to further tools, you should build BYO MCP and MCP certification into your governance strategy from the start.

Managed Environments, security 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 – from DLP policies and sharing limits to usage insights. The security area additionally provides data-driven recommendations to improve your security posture in a targeted way.

In practice this means: governance is no longer a single dashboard, but a connected stack – inventory, connector transparency, 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. Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat in model-driven apps lets users 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.

With agent governance in Release Wave 1 2026, Microsoft is tightening the reins further. Rolling out are, among others: admin controls for agent security, real-time risk assessment already in Copilot Studio (instead of only after deployment), tracking of inactive or unpublished agents, monitoring of Entra App IDs against identity sprawl, and per-environment Copilot credit tracking with pay-as-you-go caps to contain cost exposure. On top of that, the Agentic Center of Enablement (Agentic CoE) is entering public preview from July 2026: three AI agents in the Admin Center – Highlights, Insights and Action Plan – deliver daily tenant snapshots, automatically prioritize governance risks and propose remediation plans with a full audit trail for admins to approve before execution. 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: From tool sprawl to integrated project control

The typical reality in IT project management: for operational work, Planner, Azure DevOps and Jira run in parallel, project requests sit in Excel files or SharePoint lists, and resource planning is spread across yet more documents. The result is tool sprawl without the overarching overview – neither of the portfolio nor of team utilization.

This is exactly where professional PPM solutions on the Power Platform come in. Altus PPM and Projectum xPM run as model-driven apps on Dataverse, integrate Planner, Azure DevOps and Jira and move the previously document-based building blocks – from project requests to resource planning – into the Power Platform. This turns the scattered point solutions into a connected, governance-ready portfolio management. And because the solution runs in a Managed Environment, it automatically inherits Inventory, connector transparency, DLP and the AI guardrails from the Admin Center – governance doesn't have to be retrofitted; it is the foundation from the start.

Perspective 2: Different departments, one shared framework

It is rare for the needs of all departments to be covered by a single tool. Microsoft Planner is deliberately kept simple and is therefore preferred by many business departments – but it is too lightweight for software development; that's where Jira and Azure DevOps play to their strengths. Add to that classic project plans, requests and resource overviews, each bringing its own tools. This heterogeneity is normal and sensible – every team works with what suits its way of working.

What's missing is the layer above: a tool that brings this data together and creates a unified framework – true project governance across all departments. That is exactly what Altus PPM and Projectum xPM deliver. As model-driven apps on Dataverse, they consolidate the information from the various operational tools into a shared portfolio picture and lay common standards for status, prioritization, resources and reporting on top.

Because this runs on Dataverse, this governance layer fits seamlessly into the stack the Admin Center now provides: tenant-wide inventory, connector transparency, Managed Environments, DLP and security recommendations apply just as they do for any other Power Platform solution. For IT leaders this means: the PPM solution isn't another island, but the integrating building block – and at the same time cleanly embedded in the existing Microsoft management and security model. That also simplifies replacing Project Online and 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 – and with connector transparency, Advanced Connector Policies, MCP governance and sharper AI guardrails from the June and July 2026 updates, it is visibly maturing further. 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 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 connector 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.