CoE Starter Kit - What It Actually Does and What to Build on Top

“We need governance.”

Every Power Platform admin hears this eventually. Usually after the third time a flow breaks in production, or someone builds a canvas app that pulls from 6 SharePoint lists and shares it with 300 people, or a DLP policy blocks a flow that finance depends on and nobody knows who owns it.

Microsoft’s answer is the CoE Starter Kit for Power Platform. It is a collection of Power Apps, Power Automate flows, Dataverse tables, and Power BI dashboards that together give you visibility and control over your Power Platform environment. It is free. It is open source. And it is both powerful and frustrating.

Here is what the CoE Starter Kit actually does, where it falls short, and what you should build on top of it.

What the CoE Starter Kit Is

The CoE Starter Kit is a reference implementation built entirely with Power Platform’s own tools. It uses Power Apps for admin and maker UIs, Power Automate for automation and compliance workflows, Dataverse for data storage, and Power BI for dashboards. It demonstrates what is possible with the platform’s native capabilities while solving real governance problems.

It is not the Center of Excellence itself. A CoE needs people, processes, and communication. The kit is the tooling layer that supports those things.

The Three Modules

The kit ships in three core modules plus several add-ons.

Core Components - The Foundation

This is where you start. Core Components runs a set of cloud flows that periodically sync all Power Platform resources from the admin APIs into Dataverse tables. After the sync completes, you have a complete inventory:

• Every canvas app, model-driven app, and Power Pages site
• Every cloud flow, desktop flow, and connection
• Every connector used, including custom connectors
• Every maker who built something
• Every environment and its configuration
• DLP policies and which environments they apply to

This inventory powers everything else. The Power BI dashboard sits on top of these tables and gives you the bird’s-eye view: how many apps exist, who the top makers are, which connectors are most used, which apps have the most users, and which resources are inactive.

The DLP Editor app lets you see the impact of data policies on existing apps and flows before you apply them. This alone saves hours of “we broke 47 flows with that DLP change” incidents.

Governance Components - Compliance Workflows

Once you have inventory, you need compliance. Governance Components adds:

• Developer Compliance Center. A canvas app where makers provide business justification, risk assessment, and support contact information for their apps and flows. Admins can require this for any app shared with more than a threshold number of users.
• Inactivity notifications. Flows that identify apps and flows that have not been used in a configurable number of days. Instead of admins hunting these down, the system emails the maker: “Your flow has not run in 90 days. Do you still need it?”
• Archival processes. If a maker confirms they no longer need a resource, the system archives or deletes it automatically.
• Flow Approval Business Process Flow. A process for reviewing and approving flows before they go to production. Note: this is a CoE component, not a native Power Platform feature. It is a model-driven BPF that you configure and customize.

Nurture Components - Maker Community

The least technical but arguably most impactful module:

• Maker onboarding. Welcome emails, training links, and getting-started guides for new makers.
• Training tracking. Track which makers have completed required training before they can build in production environments.
• App Catalog. A shared catalog where makers discover and reuse existing apps and templates instead of building from scratch.
• Community site template. A SharePoint communication site template for your internal Power Platform community.

Additional Components

Beyond the three core modules:

• Innovation Backlog. A canvas app for capturing and prioritizing automation ideas from across the organization. Business users submit ideas, and the CoE team triages and assigns them.
• Admin Task Planner. Helps admins organize and track governance tasks.
• Power BI Dashboard. Deep analytics on adoption, usage trends, and compliance status.

The Honest Assessment

I have deployed the CoE Starter Kit for half a dozen organizations. Here is what works and what does not.

What Works

Inventory sync is genuinely useful. Before the CoE kit, getting a complete picture of your Power Platform estate meant writing custom scripts against the admin APIs. The kit does this for you, with incremental sync, error handling, and Dataverse storage. The Power BI dashboards on top are solid.

Compliance workflows change maker behavior. When makers know they will get an email asking “why does your flow exist?” they tend to build more thoughtfully. The inactivity notifications alone reclaim significant capacity.

DLP Editor saves painful mistakes. Seeing the impact of a policy change before applying it is table stakes for enterprise governance. The kit provides this in a way that the admin center historically did not.

Power BI dashboards are production-ready. The dashboard templates are well designed and cover the metrics that matter: adoption trends, connector usage, inactive resources, maker activity, and compliance status.

What Does Not Work

Setup complexity is brutal. The kit contains 50+ cloud flows, 30+ Dataverse tables, and multiple canvas and model-driven apps. Initial setup takes a full day for someone experienced. For someone new to it, expect a week. Environment variables, connection references, and flow activation order all matter.

Update fragility. When Microsoft releases a new version of the kit, updating it can break customizations you have made. The kit uses managed solutions, so your unmanaged customizations may conflict. Every update requires testing.

Not officially supported by Microsoft Support. The kit is a community-supported, open-source project maintained by the Power CAT team. If something breaks, you file a GitHub issue - not a support ticket. For organizations that require formal vendor support, this is a risk.

Scale challenges. In tenants with thousands of environments and tens of thousands of flows, the sync process can time out or hit API throttling limits. You need to configure the sync carefully and monitor flow run health.

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What Is Missing: Build These on Top

The CoE Starter Kit gives you inventory and basic compliance. But there are several gaps worth filling with custom extensions. The kit is designed to be extended - Microsoft provides official guidance on how to add custom components without breaking updates.

1. AI-Powered Flow Analysis

The kit syncs flow metadata into Dataverse. But it does not analyze flow definitions. The flow JSON contains everything: actions used, connectors referenced, error handling patterns, hardcoded values, scope nesting depth, and naming patterns.

Build a scheduled flow that reads flow definitions from the Dataverse workflow table (specifically the clientdata column), sends the JSON to an AI service, and stores the analysis results. Categorize flows by risk level (simple notification vs. critical financial process), identify flows missing error handling, flag hardcoded URLs or credentials.

We cover this in detail in the AI-powered flow review article.

2. Domain Auto-Categorization

The CoE kit asks makers to self-categorize their apps and flows through the Developer Compliance Center. Makers are inconsistent. “Finance” vs “Accounting” vs “Budget” for the same department.

Use AI to auto-categorize based on flow content: connector types (SharePoint = likely collaboration, D365 = likely CRM operations, SAP = likely ERP integration), action names, and data entities referenced. Pre-populate the category and let the maker confirm or override.

3. Governance Digest Email

The CoE kit has individual notifications for specific events (inactivity, compliance request). What it lacks is a weekly executive summary.

Build a scheduled flow that runs every Monday morning and sends a digest:

• New apps and flows created this week
• Resources flagged for compliance review
• Inactive resources pending deletion
• Top makers by activity
• Connectors used for the first time
• Any DLP policy violations

Pull the data from the CoE Dataverse tables, format it into an email, and send it to the governance team. Keep it short. Leadership does not want 50 rows of data. They want 5 numbers with context.

4. Custom Dashboards Beyond Starter Power BI

The kit’s Power BI templates are good, but every organization has specific questions:

• “Which flows process financial transactions?” (Risk assessment)
• “How many flows were created by contractors who left?” (Orphaned resource risk)
• “What is our connector diversity?” (Vendor dependency analysis)
• “Which environments have no DLP policy?” (Policy gap analysis)

Build these as additional Power BI pages or separate reports that sit on the same Dataverse tables the CoE kit populates.

5. Maker Skill Assessment

The Nurture Components track training completion. They do not assess actual maker skill level based on what they build. A maker who completed all training modules but only builds simple SharePoint notification flows has different governance needs than a maker building multi-connector, try-catch-scoped, environment-variable-driven integrations.

Score makers based on the complexity and quality of their flows (using the AI analysis from point 1), and use that score to determine which governance track they belong on: lightweight self-service for experienced makers, guided compliance for new ones.

Is the CoE Starter Kit Worth the Setup Effort?

It depends on your scale. For organizations with over 1,000 apps and flows across multiple environments, the CoE Starter Kit pays for its setup time within weeks through automated inventory, compliance workflows, and maker accountability. For smaller teams with fewer than 200 resources, the native admin center and Managed Environments features cover most governance needs without the overhead.

When to Use CoE vs. a Lightweight Approach

If you are a small team: skip the full kit. Use the Power Platform admin center, Managed Environments features (sharing limits, solution checker, weekly digests), and a few custom Power Automate flows for inventory and notifications. You get 70% of the value with 10% of the setup effort.

If you are a large enterprise: deploy the kit, invest in setup and testing, assign someone to maintain it, and build the custom extensions listed above. The kit becomes your governance platform.

The Hybrid Approach

Many organizations land in the middle. Microsoft recommends starting with the native admin center and Managed Environments capabilities, then layering CoE Starter Kit components where you need more than the built-in features provide. The two complement each other:

• Managed Environments handle proactive, real-time enforcement (sharing limits, solution checker blocking)
• CoE Starter Kit handles reactive, async governance (inventory analysis, compliance workflows, maker communication)

Managed Environments uses private APIs built into the platform. The CoE kit uses public APIs. That means Managed Environments can enforce limits before they are exceeded, while the CoE kit can only react after the fact. For critical guardrails like sharing limits and solution checker, use Managed Environments. For everything else, the CoE kit fills the gaps.

Getting Started

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Power Automate Governance - The Enterprise Playbook

This article is part of a 10-part series:

1. Naming Conventions That Scale
2. Environment Strategy - Dev Test Prod
3. Solution-Aware Flows
4. Flow Inventory
5. Pipelines - Dev to Prod
6. CoE Starter Kit
7. AI-Powered Flow Review
8. Versioning and Source Control
9. The Governance Repo
10. Weekly Governance Digest

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AZ365.ai - Azure and AI insights for architects building on Microsoft. Follow Alex on LinkedIn for architecture deep dives.