Power Platform Center of Excellence (CoE) Toolkit

The Power Platform Center of Excellence (CoE) Starter Kit is Microsoft's free, open-source toolkit of Power Apps, Power Automate flows, and Power BI dashboards for governing the Power Platform at scale. For any tenant with more than a handful of makers, deploying the CoE Toolkit is one of the highest-ROI governance investments available.

What the CoE Toolkit provides

A connected set of tools that together give an organisation visibility and control over Power Platform usage:

Inventory

Apps — every Power App across every environment, with owner, last-used, sharing posture.
Flows — every Power Automate flow, with trigger, connector usage, run status.
Bots and agents — Copilot Studio bots in the tenant.
Environments — list of every environment, type, capacity usage.
Connections — every connection used by apps and flows.

Analytics

App and flow usage trends over time.
Top makers by app / flow count.
Top apps by user count.
Orphaned resources — owned by departed users or disabled accounts.
Risky apps — using premium connectors without licensing.

Governance

Maker compliance — onboarding processes for new citizen developers.
App reviews and approvals — workflows for promoting apps to production.
Bulk operations — disable many flows, clean up many apps, reassign owners.
Communication tools — message makers about policy changes.

Adoption

Maker scoring — gamification of citizen-developer adoption.
Centre of excellence newsletter templates.
Training tracker integrated with Microsoft Learn.

How it works

The CoE Toolkit is itself built on Power Platform — it's a collection of Power Apps, flows, and Power BI dashboards that consume Microsoft Graph and the Power Platform admin APIs to discover and analyse. Installation:

Download from the Microsoft 365 PnP CoE Starter Kit GitHub repository.
Set up a dedicated environment for the CoE Toolkit.
Import the solution.
Configure connections to Microsoft Graph and the Power Platform admin API.
Initial inventory runs — typically takes hours for larger tenants.
Schedule ongoing inventory updates.
Customise the included Power BI dashboards.

Microsoft publishes detailed deployment guidance, plus a community of practitioners actively contributing improvements.

Why it matters

Without the CoE Toolkit, governing Power Platform usage requires:

Manual inventory via PowerShell — error-prone and incomplete.
Per-environment access for each maker's environment — unwieldy.
No tenant-wide visibility into who's building what.

The result: Power Platform sprawls. Hundreds of apps and flows exist that nobody can find or attribute. Premium connector usage creeps up. Orphaned resources accumulate. Eventually a governance review forces a painful clean-up.

The CoE Toolkit lets you avoid that. Stand it up early; review monthly.

Roles in a Power Platform CoE

The CoE Toolkit is most useful when paired with a CoE team — usually small (1–3 people for a mid-size organisation):

Programme lead — owns the CoE strategy, reports to leadership.
Technical lead — owns the CoE Toolkit itself, governance configurations.
Adoption lead — runs the maker community, training, champions network.

For larger organisations, separate roles for app reviews, security reviews, and architecture standards may exist.

What the CoE Toolkit doesn't do

It doesn't enforce policies automatically — it surfaces information for humans to act on.
It doesn't replace DLP policies — DLP is enforced; the toolkit reports on what exists.
It doesn't manage user training directly — it tracks training, but the actual training happens elsewhere.

Licensing

The CoE Toolkit is free, but it does use premium connectors and Dataverse, so the CoE environment itself needs Power Apps Premium licences for the CoE team using it. Typical cost: a handful of premium licences for the CoE staff.

For Microsoft 365 customers with serious Power Platform adoption — say 50+ makers — deploying the CoE Toolkit early is essentially mandatory. Without it, governance becomes a permanent crisis.