Looking for PowerObjects? Don’t worry, you’re in the right place! We’ve been part of HCL for several years, and we’ve now taken the final step in our acquisition journey: moving our website to the HCL domain. Nothing else is changing – we are still fanatically focused on Microsoft Business Applications!

Introducing PowerALM

Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) for Power Platform

Maximizing the investment your organization makes in Power Platform requires a carefully orchestrated and meticulously documented approach to managing the applications you build with it. Enter PowerALM, a tool designed and built by HCLTech to simplify, streamline and automate Application Lifecycle Management.
Dynamics 365 Business Central is a single, comprehensive solution that automatically pulls systems and processes together to manage financials, sales, service, and operations. Business Central connects third party applications for payroll, banking, CRM, and industry-specific systems.
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Why ALM for Power Platform Matters

Fundamentally, Application Lifecycle Management is the integrated system of organizational processes, people and tools used to manage the entire lifecycle of any given application – from planning, development and deployment to governance, ongoing maintenance and eventual deprecation. In many organizations, this is an arduous and time-consuming process – one that is too often neglected or ignored altogether.

The problem is, neglecting or ignoring it can lead to issues related to compliance, accuracy and user experience. That’s true of any application but is especially relevant with those built using Power Platform. For all its nearly unlimited potential, Power Platform application development does also come with inherent risks and challenges that must be carefully mitigated and managed.

Differences between Environments

  • Solutions may fail to import
  • Manual intervention is often required after solution import to:
    • Fix issues like broken lookups in workflows
    • Update environment-specific configurations

Limitations of Solutions

  • Not all components and settings can be added to solutions
  • Inability to add data to a solution that requires it to function properly
  • Not using managed solutions outside development
  • Dependencies on other solutions

Customization Challenges

  • Development environment acts as source control for customizations
  • Customization and development best practices are not always followed
  • Difficult to hotfix production while a development cycle is in progress
Mitigating these risks and conquering such challenges may seem overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be. With HCLTech and PowerALM in your corner, Power Platform Application Lifecycle Management is a snap!

Why PowerALM from HCLTech

From a high-level perspective, PowerALM for Power Platform makes that “carefully orchestrated and meticulously documented approach to lifecycle management” accessible and manageable in your organization. In fact, it provides benefits at every stage of the development process.
Digging deeper, PowerALM provides the features your organization needs to simplify, streamline and automate your application lifecycle management process.

Simplify

  • Power Platform connectivity configurations
    • Connect using client id/secret or username/password credentials
    • Uses Azure DevOps service connections to securely store and reuse connection details
    • Environment URLs can be overridden for connections to newly created environments without a service connection
    • Connections can impersonate other users to accommodate operations that require a licensed user
  • Easy to use for novices but configurable for experts
  • Designed to keep up with platform changes and enhancements
  • Dedicated support is available from HCLTech

Streamline

  • Export managed & unmanaged solutions in single step
  • The Publish Customization step is built into the import solution task
  • Extended configuration import & export options
  • Exported solutions, configuration data, translation, and settings files can be extracted and sorted to make comparisons in source control more useful
  • Source control integration:
    • Azure DevOps, GitHub, & BitBucket using Git
    • Azure DevOps using TFVC
  • Enable verbose logging and output build agent environment variables and file system to streamline the troubleshooting of pipeline issues
  • Azure DevOps tasks are built to be versioned to reduce risk of introducing breaking changes in future

Automate

  • Uses the latest versions of all Microsoft libraries without needing to include a tool installer step
  • Tool installer that can target specific library versions is available to ensure new versions don’t introduce unexpected changes
  • Automatic failover to a PowerALM backup repository when NuGet or the PowerShell Gallery are down and preventing libraries from being downloaded
  • Tasks automatically output variables with path/file names, versions, etc. to make configuring other pipeline steps easier
  • Extracted files will automatically be compressed prior to import
  • No need to include extra steps to test connections, as PowerALM will automatically retry when first try fails due to “cold” environment