Create an environment

- [Narrator] There are a couple of reasons you might be watching this movie right now. One is you've watched the other movies in this course. Now that you're at the end, you're thinking, I'd like to do some more work with Power Apps and the Common Data Service, and I know I'm going to do that work for a unique set of users, or for users with different permissions than our other environment, so I want to create a new environment for them. The other possibility is that you are at the start of this course and you don't have access to an environment that has the Common Data Service database in it, and so you want to create an environment and provision it with the database. So a couple of reasons you might be here. If you're going to create and provision an environment with the database, then it is a two step process. First, create the environment, which we'll do in this movie. And then second, create a Common Data Service for Apps database that lives in that environment. You need to have some high level permissions to create environments and provision them in this way in PowerApps. First you need a Plan 2 level license either for PowerApps or Flow. Or if you're just starting this course, and you're one of the first people in your organization to be checking things out in PowerApps, then what you can do is you can apply for a PowerApps Plan 2 trial for free. If you do that, that Plan 2 license is part of why you're getting that free trial. Its not one of the longer Microsoft trials. It's currently only 30 days, so don't do this thinking you're going to take this course two months from now. Next, you need to have administrative permissions. There are three different ways currently that you can have the administrative permissions to create environment and add a database to it. The first is, that you are the environment administrator for your PowerApps set up, and if you are running the free trial and you're the first person in your organization that is setting this up, then somebody is the environment administrator and it's probably you. Next, you might have administrative permissions as the Office 365 global admin for your organization. And those are sufficient permissions. Or you might be the Azure Active Directory tenant administrator. Any of these sets of permissions, combined with one of these licenses, will give you permission to do what we're going to do next. So what happens if you don't have these things? Well, go talk to your administrator for PowerApps and the Power Platform and tell them what it is you're wanting to do and what you need. They might point you to an environment that already exists that you don't know is there or they might provision an environment for you. But assuming that you have what you need to go forward, let's switch over to the admin center for PowerApps. In the admin center in the navigation panel on the left, we have environments, data policies, data integration, and information about our tenant. Tenants can have a number of different environments. You'll notice I have the default environment that was created when I first began work with PowerApps a couple of years ago, and a test environment I created a few months later, and both of those now need to be upgraded so that they can use the Common Data Service. I also have my KinetEco environment here. If I click on any of these it will tell me what I have. This is a Dynamics365Instance. In terms of resources, it will show me any apps and any flows that have been created. It takes a minute for us to load these things up. And information about security. Then I can back out. So, these are the environments I have but I want to create a new one. I'm going to click the new environment button. I need to give my environment a name. I'm going to call it PowerApps Demo. Then chose a region. Now if you're in the United States, it's easy to skip right past this. There actually is a different region, "Preview United States", and the United States Preview will allow you to join the Preview Program and give you early access to upcoming brand new features for Microsoft PowerApps. You can't change this once you have created the new environment. When I tell it I'm interested in the preview, it tells me that Common Data Service for Apps is not available in the United States first release region, which is the region that I'm in. So it says if you want to use Common Data Service for Apps, which I do, chose a different region, so I'm going to go back to United States Default. But notice that I could create an environment that was using the preview, so that I could look at those new features and not use the Common Data Service for that exploration in that environment. Two choices under my license for different types of environments that I can create, trial or production. Production is just what it says, it is an environment that I intend to add users to later on. I'm going to simply create a trial environment, and I'm going to click create environment. It says, you created an environment, do you want to create a database? Your environment includes access to the Common Data Service. Create a database to start using it. Collect store and share data, use data modeling, create custom forms. All these things we want to do and this is absolutely what we want to do. And I'll show you how to create the database in the next movie.