CoE Starter Kit: What It Is and Which Modules You Actually Need

What Is the CoE Starter Kit?

The Centre of Excellence (CoE) Starter Kit is a free, open-source set of Power Platform solutions maintained by Microsoft. It gives you visibility into everything happening across your Power Platform tenant — every app, every flow, every connector, every maker — and provides tools to govern, nurture, and manage that estate.

Think of it as the governance layer that Power Platform does not ship with out of the box. The admin centre gives you some of this information, but it is scattered across multiple pages, lacks historical trending, and has no built-in workflow for acting on what you find. The CoE Starter Kit consolidates all of that into a single Dataverse-backed system with apps, flows, and dashboards.

A few things to understand upfront:

It is not a product. It is a set of solutions hosted on GitHub, updated roughly every two months. There is no SLA, no dedicated support team, and breaking changes happen.
It is not mandatory. You can govern Power Platform without it. But it saves hundreds of hours of building your own inventory and governance tooling.
It runs inside Power Platform. The kit uses the same platform it governs — Power Apps for the UI, Power Automate for the automation, Dataverse for the data, and Power BI for the reporting.
It needs a dedicated environment. Never install it in the default environment. It creates dozens of tables, flows, and apps that you do not want mixed with business workloads.

The Modules Explained

The CoE Starter Kit is split into distinct modules. You do not have to deploy all of them, and in most cases you should not deploy all of them on day one. Here is what each module actually does.

Core Module

The Core module is the foundation. Everything else depends on it. It does three essential things:

Inventory sync — A set of cloud flows that call the Power Platform admin APIs and write the results into Dataverse tables. After the first sync completes, you have a full inventory of every environment, app, flow, custom connector, bot, and maker in your tenant. The sync runs daily to keep the data current.
Admin View app — A model-driven app that lets you browse the inventory. You can see every app, who owns it, which connectors it uses, when it was last modified, and how many sessions it has had. This is your operational cockpit.
DLP Editor — A canvas app for managing Data Loss Prevention policies. It is often easier to use than the admin centre DLP editor, especially when you need to see the impact of a policy change across multiple environments.
Command Centre — A canvas app that acts as the landing page. It links to all other CoE apps and provides quick-access tiles for common admin tasks.

Without the Core module, none of the other modules have data to work with. Always deploy Core first.

Governance Module

The Governance module adds workflow on top of the inventory data. Where Core tells you what exists, Governance helps you act on it.

Key components:

Compliance Centre — An app where admins can review apps and flows that have been flagged by governance processes. You can set compliance requirements (such as “every production app must have a business justification”) and track which resources meet them.
Inactivity notifications — Flows that identify apps and flows that have not been used or modified in a configurable period (default 60 days) and email the maker asking if they are still needed. If the maker does not respond, the resource gets flagged for cleanup.
Orphaned resource cleanup — Identifies resources owned by people who have left the organisation (disabled accounts). Notifies the maker’s manager or a designated admin to decide what to do with them.
App quarantine — The ability to quarantine apps that violate governance policies. Quarantined apps are disabled until the maker addresses the issue.
Archive scoring — An automated scoring system that rates each app and flow based on usage, last modification date, connector count, and other factors. Higher scores mean the resource is more likely safe to archive. This gives you a data-driven approach to cleanup instead of guessing.

Nurture Module

Governance without enablement breeds shadow IT. The Nurture module provides tools to support and grow your maker community.

Video Hub — A canvas app for hosting training videos. Think of it as an internal YouTube playlist for Power Platform learning.
Training Management — Track training events, registrations, and completions. Useful if you run internal workshops or bootcamps.
Maker Assessment — A self-assessment quiz that helps makers understand their skill level and identifies gaps. The results feed into the inventory so admins can see the maturity of their maker base.
Template Catalogue — A library of approved app and flow templates. Instead of makers starting from scratch, they pick a vetted template with best practices baked in.
Pulse Survey — A recurring survey sent to makers to gauge satisfaction, identify blockers, and measure the health of your Power Platform programme. Results appear in the Power BI dashboard.

Innovation Backlog

This module gives business users a way to submit automation ideas and lets CoE admins prioritise them. It includes:

An idea submission app where anyone in the organisation can propose a process for automation
A scoring and prioritisation system based on business impact, complexity, and alignment with strategy
A pipeline view showing which ideas are under review, approved, in progress, or delivered

It is lightweight and works well as a front door for your CoE — instead of people building rogue apps, they submit ideas and get proper support.

ALM Accelerator

The ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) Accelerator is technically part of the CoE Starter Kit, but it solves a very different problem. It provides CI/CD pipelines for Power Platform solutions using Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions.

If your organisation has professional developers building Power Platform solutions that need proper source control, branching, automated testing, and managed deployments across dev/test/prod environments, the ALM Accelerator is what you want.

However, it is significantly more complex to set up than the other modules, requires Azure DevOps or GitHub, and is really aimed at pro-dev teams rather than citizen makers. Treat it as a separate initiative from your governance rollout.

Power BI Dashboard

The Power BI dashboard is the reporting layer across all modules. It connects to the Dataverse tables populated by the Core sync flows and provides over 13 pages of visualisations split into three sections:

Monitor — Tenant-wide metrics: environment count, app count, flow count, maker count, connector usage, creation trends over time.
Govern — Governance-focused views: environment capacity, archive scores, compliance status, connector deep dives, premium licence usage.
Nurture — Maker community health: pulse survey results, training completion, maker assessment scores.

Even if you deploy no other module beyond Core, the Power BI dashboard alone is worth the effort. It turns raw inventory data into actionable insights that you can share with leadership.

Administration Planner

A newer module that provides a structured way to track admin tasks and projects. Think of it as a lightweight project tracker specifically for Power Platform administration work. It includes:

Task templates for common admin activities (environment provisioning, DLP policy reviews, licence assignments)
A Kanban-style board for tracking progress
Integration with the rest of the CoE Kit so tasks can be auto-generated from governance processes

It is useful but not essential for most organisations starting out. Consider it a phase-two addition once your Core and Governance modules are stable.

Which Modules Do You Actually Need?

This is the question everyone asks, and the honest answer depends on your organisation size and maturity. Here is a practical decision matrix.

Small Organisations (Fewer Than 50 Makers)

Deploy: Core + Power BI Dashboard

At this scale, you probably know most of your makers personally. You do not need automated inactivity notifications or formal compliance processes — a monthly review of the dashboard is enough. The Core module gives you the inventory, and the Power BI dashboard gives you the visibility to spot issues before they become problems.

Skip Governance automation for now. You can handle orphaned resources and cleanup manually when you only have a few dozen apps and flows to manage.

Medium Organisations (50 to 500 Makers)

Deploy: Core + Governance + Power BI Dashboard + Nurture basics

At this scale, manual governance breaks down. You cannot personally review every new app, and makers are creating resources faster than you can track them. The Governance module’s automated notifications and compliance tracking become essential.

Deploy the Nurture module’s template catalogue and maker assessment at minimum. When you have hundreds of makers, you need a scalable way to ensure quality and provide guidance.

Consider the Innovation Backlog if you are receiving ad-hoc automation requests from business units. It gives you a proper intake process.

Enterprise Organisations (500+ Makers)

Deploy: Everything

At enterprise scale, you need the full toolkit. Every module serves a purpose:

Core for inventory (non-negotiable)
Governance for automated compliance and cleanup (you cannot do this manually at scale)
Nurture for maker enablement and community building (essential to prevent shadow IT)
Innovation Backlog for demand management (you will drown in requests otherwise)
Power BI Dashboard for reporting to leadership (they will ask for metrics)
ALM Accelerator for your pro-dev teams (they need proper CI/CD)
Administration Planner for coordination across your admin team

Even at enterprise scale, deploy incrementally. Start with Core, get the sync running clean, then add Governance, then Nurture, then the rest. Trying to deploy everything at once is a recipe for frustration.

Prerequisites Summary

Before you start installing anything, ensure you have:

A dedicated Dataverse environment — Create a new environment specifically for the CoE Starter Kit. Use a production environment type, not sandbox, if you want audit log data. Never use the default environment.
Azure AD app registrations — You need two: one for Microsoft Graph API access (to pull user information and audit logs) and one for the Power Platform admin APIs. Both need admin consent granted by a Global Administrator or the appropriate delegated admin.
Power Apps Per User licence — The service account running the sync flows needs a Per User licence (or Per App licence assigned to the CoE apps). The Developer Plan is not sufficient for production CoE deployments.
Power Platform admin role — The service account needs either Global Administrator, Power Platform Administrator, or Dynamics 365 Service Administrator role. Without this, the inventory sync returns empty results.
Unified audit logging enabled — If you want audit log data (and you do — it powers the usage analytics), ensure unified audit logging is turned on in the Microsoft Purview compliance portal.
Time and patience — The initial sync in a medium-to-large tenant can take 24 to 48 hours to complete. This is normal. The sync flows call throttled APIs and process potentially thousands of resources.

Getting Started

If you are ready to deploy, start with the setup guide for the Core module. It walks through every step from creating the environment to verifying your first successful sync.

The key advice from every organisation that has deployed the CoE Starter Kit successfully: start small, verify each step, and expand gradually. The most common failure pattern is trying to deploy everything at once, hitting an error, and not knowing which component caused it.

The CoE Starter Kit is not a set-and-forget tool. It is a living system that needs regular maintenance — updating to new releases, reviewing sync health, acting on the governance data it surfaces. Budget ongoing time for it, even if it is just an hour a week to check the dashboard and review flagged items.

Use the CoE Maturity Assessment to evaluate where your organisation stands today and identify which modules will give you the most immediate value. And if you are building governance policies to go alongside the kit, the Governance Policy Generator can help you create the documentation framework.