Environment Groups is a feature to let you club the environments of your choice together in order to govern them commonly and easily with Rules for the environments.

The Rules as of now which you can govern commonly for the grouped Environments are –

1. Sharing controls for Canvas Apps
2. Usage Insights
3. Maker welcome content
4. Solution checker enforcement
5. Backup retention
6. Enable AI-generated descriptions (preview)
   
   Let’s see how you can do this!

Environment Groups

Here’s how you can use Environment Groups in Power Platform Admin Center given that you have the correct Dynamics 365 Admin privileges –

1. You’ll see in the Power Platform Admin Center that Environment Groups is its own section.
   
   
2. Here, can you can click on Create a group as the button suggests and It’ll let you create a Group.
   
   
3. Next obvious step is to simply give it a Name and Description.
   
   
4. Once done, you’ll be able to select Environments to be added to the Group you just created.
   
   
5. Then, select the ones which are relevant to be added to this group. Once done selecting, click on Add environments.
   
   
6. Next, you’ll need to turn on the Managed Environment Modes for the selected environments. If all selected already have Managed Environments feature turned on, then they’ll simply be added further. In order to understand Managed Environments feature, you can refer to this post – Enable Managed Environments in Power Platform Admin Center
   
   
   
7. It takes a few moments to turn on Managed Environments, then you can finally click on Add Environments to add them to the Group.
   As you see in the notification area, it takes a few moments to add the environments.
   
   
8. Once the processing has been completed on the backend, the environments will be added.
   

Rules for Environment Groups

Now, let’s see how you can commonly set Rules for the environments in the Environment Group –

1. You’ll see the tab called as Rules. Once your environments are added, you can go to this tab to look at the Rules you can change and apply.
   
   
2. You’ll see that by default, the rules remain as is and are not commonly applied. Let’s modify Backup Retention rule at first.
   Once you select a Rule, you’ll get to Edit it.
   
   
3. Once you Edit, for example, Backup Retention – you’ll see the default values which you can change in order to commonly apply to the environments in the Environment Group.
   
   
4. Now, I’ll change it to 21 Days, as an example. Then, click Save.
   
   
5. Let me change another rule.
   
   
6. Now, you’ll see that the changed Rules will have star mark on it and are marked as bold.
   
   
7. Now, when you click Publish, it takes a few moments for the Rules to be published and you’ll see the last published rules once applied.
   
   
   And here’s the latest status once changed.
   
   

In order to fully understand the capabilities and limitations of the Environment Groups, follow this Microsoft article on the same – https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/admin/environment-groups?WT.mc_id=DX-MVP-5003911

Hope this was useful!

Thank you!