It is possible to create some kind of manual ALM for Dataverse for Teams (DV4T) solutions, but they need many manual steps and move the solution as unmanaged if you wish to update the solution multiple times and do development, testing and production releases in different environments. This post tell you how to setup the ALM. At first you need to setup your development environment and first solution, then you could start following instructions in this post.
I strongly suggest using normal maker-portal and Power Apps licenses to get the full functionality of ALM and CI/CD pipelines.
In my case I had specifications to use normal Enterprise or Business Basic licenses since there could not be possibility buy Power Apps licenses for whole organization. I needed to study this solution and how to create some kind of dev-test-prod lifecycle and environments, so new releases and bug fixing can be done with this solution.
Environments for DEV and TEST – don’t do PROD
Previous blog post instructed to create the DEVELOPMENT team, which will acting as development environment. In the background each Teams team gets it’s own Power Platform environment with type of Teams.
Now you should create similar environment for TEST if you wish to have testing environment separately from development playground. Share membership for this team for anyone you want to test the solution.
Since this is running in Teams, you should not create any PRODUCTION team – just use the normal team which is already shared to your organization users. If you have not created any Canvas App to that team before, off course it is not listed in the Build tab teams when you will search for the maker-portal.
You need to create first app in the “production” team, where you want to install the solution to get it visible. Wait until Getting things ready, then repeat creating an app and you can name it for example Production holder (just for the fun of it =)
Now you are able to see the production environment and access the maker-portal.
Moving between and favorites to browser
Move to between different environment maker-portals from Teams application Power Apps, then Build tab and select wanted team and then with three dots and Open in Power Apps.
Once you get the maker-portal open for your DEV or TEST environment, I suggest to save the url as favorite in your browser since walking here is so difficult.
Publishing between environments
Manual ALM from DEV to TEST
1. Export solution as MANAGED from DEV environment
2. Import solution to TEST environment
3. Go to TEST environment Canvas App by navigating to Power Apps application and on Home tab you can see the app and on the right side you see the team telling you which environment application you are on. Please do not edit the Canvas App in TEST or PROD even if you can.
4. Once the app is open, on the top right corner add it to Teams channel with the + sign and then click Save and close.
This must be done only first time after importing the solution
Manual ALM installation to PROD
5. Go to PRODUCTION environment maker-portal – which is the actual team where you want to publish your solution.
6. Import the solution like in step 2. Use the same solution package you exported in step 1.
7. Publish the Canvas by going to the Home tab of Power Apps Teams application, select the correct Canvas App in the team you want to publish and then in the Canvas App editor on the top right corner publish it into the correct channel like in step 4.
This must be done only first time after importing the solution