🧠 Stabilization & Post-Go-Live Strategy in Power Platform Projects

🛠️ Problem Statement

Launching a Power Platform solution is only half the journey—true success begins after go-live. Many organizations face significant post-implementation challenges, such as:

• User adoption issues due to lack of training or confidence

• System performance degradation from unmonitored workloads

• Poor support readiness leading to unresolved issues and user frustration

• Absence of change management, causing disruptions as enhancements are made

These challenges, if not addressed, can derail even the most successful implementations. Stabilization isn't just a technical phase—it's a business-critical step to ensure that the solution delivers long-term value.

🧠 Cutover Strategy in Power Platform & Dynamics 365 Projects

 

🛠️ Problem Statement

Transitioning from a legacy system to a modern solution like Dynamics 365 or Power Platform often results in downtime, data inconsistencies, user confusion, or integration failures. Without a well-defined cutover strategy, businesses risk major disruptions during go-live.

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🎯 Solution Goals

• Minimize downtime during go-live.

• Ensure data integrity during migration.

• Provide business continuity with fallback mechanisms.

• Coordinate roles and responsibilities across teams.

• Build a rollback plan to handle unforeseen issues.

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🔍 Solution Overview

A Cutover Strategy is a comprehensive plan that defines the sequence of tasks, stakeholder roles, timing, and risk mitigation steps needed to move from the current environment to the new production environment. It is the final stage before the go-live and includes:

• Dry Runs & Dress Rehearsals

• Communication Plan

• Final Data Migration

• User Access Validation

• System Configuration Freeze

• Post Go-Live Support Plan

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🌐 Real-World Use Case

Client: Large Retail Chain with 300+ stores
Scenario: Migrating from on-prem Dynamics CRM 2016 to Dynamics 365 CE + Power Platform

Challenges:

• Live orders and loyalty programs needed 24/7 availability

• 1000+ sales agents using mobile apps

• Integration with Azure-based inventory systems

Solution:

• Weekend cutover planned with full rehearsal in a sandbox

• Delta migration used for final data sync

• Read-only access to legacy system post go-live

• Multi-region support team engaged for hypercare

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🧩 Key Components of a Cutover Strategy

1. Cutover Plan Document: Master plan of every activity

2. Go/No-Go Checklist: Ensures all prerequisites met

3. Rollback Plan: Backup restoration and re-routing logic

4. Communication Plan: Who informs whom, when, and how

5. Final Migration Script: Tested and signed-off

6. Access Management: Role and permission audits

7. Hypercare Team: L1/L2/L3 support structure

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🏗️ Technical Architecture

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✅ Result / Benefits

• Zero downtime during go-live weekend

• 100% data integrity with pre-validation scripts

• Business continuity preserved with sandbox rehearsals

• Sales teams resumed work with no interruptions on Monday

• Issue resolution time reduced by 40% due to Hypercare

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🔍 Technical Insight

• Use Power Automate for system health checks during cutover

• Implement logging with Azure Monitor for migration scripts

• Use "Feature Flags" in apps to disable non-critical features initially

• Time box cutover window to 12–24 hours depending on volume

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🔐 Governance Insight

A cutover strategy ensures accountability by assigning each task to specific owners. It also enforces change control, data governance, and business continuity policies.

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✅ Governance Tip

Use Power Platform’s CoE Starter Kit to track environment changes, monitor user access, and log audit trails during cutover. It adds observability to a typically risky phase.

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🔚 Final Thought

A well-executed cutover strategy bridges the gap between development and live usage. It’s not just about switching systems—it’s about preserving trust, minimizing risk, and enabling confidence. Plan for it like your entire project depends on it—because it does.

🚀 Supercharging Governance with the Power Platform CoE Starter Kit

 Introduction

As organizations expand their low-code adoption with Power Platform, maintaining control, visibility, and governance becomes essential. Enter the Center of Excellence (CoE) Starter Kit — a powerful solution by Microsoft that enables organizations to monitor usage, nurture best practices, enforce governance, and drive adoption at scale.

This blog explores how to implement and extend the CoE Starter Kit to meet enterprise governance needs, complete with architecture, advanced use cases, and key metrics.

🔗 Designing Scalable Integration Patterns Using Power Platform & Azure Service Bus

📉 Problem Statement: The Fragile Spaghetti of Direct Integrations

As organisations scale, so do their systems—ERP, CRM, legacy apps, modern SaaS platforms, and mobile front ends. Initially, developers often build point-to-point integrations between Power Platform and external systems using:

• Power Automate flows with direct SQL/API calls

• Scheduled synchronisations

• Custom connectors per app

Result?

• Tightly coupled systems

• High latency in large data sets

• Error-prone retry mechanisms

• Lack of centralized monitoring, auditability, or retry orchestration

This architecture fails to scale — especially in large enterprises with asynchronous workflows, variable payloads, and spike-driven workloads.

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🎯 Solution Goals

✅ Build resilient, loosely coupled, and scalable integration between Power Platform and enterprise systems.
✅ Use Azure Service Bus to decouple producers (Power Platform apps) from consumers (external apps, APIs, legacy systems).
✅ Ensure real-time or near real-time processing with robust retry, dead-lettering, and auditing.
✅ Design for future extensibility — multiple consumers and parallel processing.
✅ Govern the solution using standard patterns, monitoring, and policy enforcement.

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🧩 Solution Overview

We will use a Publisher–Subscriber pattern with Azure Service Bus Topics to implement scalable integration. Power Platform (via Power Automate or plugins) publishes messages to Service Bus, while external systems subscribe and process messages independently.

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🏢 Real-World Use Case

Organization: A global e-commerce company
Scenario:
When a customer order is created in the Power App (Dataverse), downstream systems must:

• Trigger fulfillment in SAP

• Send SMS via Twilio

• Notify warehouse inventory system (custom API)

• Log data to Azure Data Lake

These systems are owned by different departments, updated asynchronously, and may fail intermittently.

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🔧 Key Components

Component	Description
Dataverse	Captures order data via Power App
Power Automate (or Plugin)	Sends message to Azure Service Bus Topic
Azure Service Bus (Topic + Subscriptions)	Acts as message broker and dispatcher
Subscriber Logic Apps / Azure Functions	Consume messages and update external systems
Application Insights	Monitoring, logging, alerts
Azure Key Vault	Securely store credentials for API connections
Power BI Dashboard	Monitor success/failure rates, latency, retry counts