Power Platform licenses demystified - Basic concepts

Power Platform licenses demystified by Éric Sauvé from XRM Vision at Scottish Summit 2022 - Basic concepts

Power Platform licenses demystified - Basic concepts

Before we get moving into the core of the subject (licenses), it's valuable that we go through some of the basic concepts that will be referred to in the follow-up posts.

What's an App?

Slide presenting the different Power Apps types

License choice decisions may quite likely be based on the number of apps your users will access. This is why it matters to understand what is an actual app in the Power Platform world.

First and foremost, apps are custom in nature, they are not first-party apps, such as Dynamics Sales.

So, they should be either one of the following Power Apps:

Model-Driven
Canvas
Portal (Power Pages are in preview)

It's also important to note that embedded Canvas Apps don’t count on top of the container app.

Connector types

The type of license required for a Power Automate cloud flow to run, or a Power Apps to be accessed may quite differ based on the type of connectors that they use. Understanding what is a premium connector will help you in that part of the equation.

The different connector types are:

Standard: mostly the Microsoft 365 ecosystem - Think of SharePoint and Outlook for example
Premium: beyond the Microsoft 365 ecosystem - Think of Dataverse for example
Custom: tailored scenarios - When you create your own connector
On-Premise: using a data gateway - such as when you want to access that good ol’ back office ERP

Multiplexing

To ensure that your solution designs and evaluations consider the right number of licenses required based on the number of actual users, it's important to understand multiplexing concepts for Power Platform and ensure not to fall into a position where you are not compliant.

At a high level:

Use of hardware or software to pool connections, reroute information, or reduce the number of users that directly access or use one of the Power Platform services
Import / Export to other systems: if a manual step is involved to process, then multiplexing shouldn’t apply
The number of tiers doesn’t matter
All users require adequate licenses

For more details on multiplexing, you can access the following PDF from Microsoft: Multiplexing - Overview | Licensing Brief (there's a section dedicated to Dynamics 365 and Power Platform scenarios)

Watch the following Scottish Summit session from Carl Cookson and Chris Huntingford: Scottish Summit 2022 - Carl Cookson - A Multiplexing Magical Mystery Tour

Request limits

As you'll see in the follow-up posts, based on the license types, a number of request limits will be allocated. Understanding what is being considered a request in Power Platform is an important factor to evaluate.

Request limits concepts:

A Power Platform Request: various actions translated as API requests
Power Apps: all requests to connectors and Dataverse
Power Automate: all requests to connectors, actions (including built-in actions), retries, pagination
Power Virtual Agents: all calls to Power Automate
Dataverse: CRUD, assign, and share – for both user-driven and internal system requests
Exceed: get ready to be throttled down!

Basic concepts Video

As for the other articles of this series, here's a video covering the basic concepts:

Power Platform licenses demystified - What's next?

In the coming weeks, I will split the presentation into specific segments for each of the licenses and plans covered, such as:

Introduction
Basic concepts
Power Apps (Seeded, Per app, Pay as you go, Per user)
Power Automate (Per user, with attended RPA, per flow, unattended add-on)
Power Virtual Agents
Power BI
Portals (Pages) and more add-ons

Stay tuned!

About me

I'm Éric Sauvé MCT & MVP, aka ZePowerDiver, Power Platform practice lead, solution architect, and consulting service director at XRM Vision. I'm a Power Platform enthusiast and speak in Power Platform and Dynamics CE related conferences.

You can reach me on:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zepowerdiver
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ZePowerDiver
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ZePowerDiver/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ZePowerDiver/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/ZePowerDiver
Blogger: https://www.zepowerdiver.com/
Github: https://github.com/ZePowerdiver/

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Published on: September 06, 2022

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Power Platform licenses demystified - Basic concepts