Traditionally when working on Microsoft Dynamics 365 projects, consultants receive a dedicated login with System Administrator privileges. The problem with this is, that the customer has to pay for an additional license which it can’t use. Especially with Dynamics 365 online, this has become more and more of an issue with customers… and rightfully so.
Enter Delegated Administrator
To solve this, Microsoft came up with the concept of a Delegated Administrator. As described in the Microsoft Docs, a Delegated Administrator provides access from someone without the organization to your Dynamics 365 environment as a System Administrator. This means that I can login with my Thrives account, and access my customers’ Dynamics 365 without consuming a license. Great, isn’t it?
A few caveats
Of course, there are a few caveats to this solution…
- You can’t use the XrmToolbox, or any code-based solution to connect to Dynamics 365
- make.powerapps.com is not working with delegated administrators.
Both of these have proven to be real pains when customizing the customers Dynamics 365. When googling this, you’ll find plenty of partners asking for a solution to this problem.
Enter Non-Interactive User
For a long time, we have been able to use Non Interactive users to resolve the first issue. With Non-Interactive users, you create a user in your customers’ Dynamics 365 system and then set to user to ‘Non-Interactive’. This way your user does not consume a user license. It doesn’t have access to the User Interface but is able to connect through api’s… which is perfect for the XrmToolbox solution.
While this works great, Non-Interactive Users don’t provide a solution for accessing the make.powerapps.com environment… Or so it seems.
When accessing the make.powerapps.com, we get prompted with a trial screen:
Which is not quite the result we were hoping for. However after some digging, we’ve found that accessing make.powerapps.com directly with the environment id in the url actually does provide access to the make.powerapps.com platform. The url looks like follows:
https://make.powerapps.com/environments/[yourenvironmentid]/solutions
In conclusion
If you do not have a dedicated full user license at your customer, here’s how you can get around:
- Use a Delegated Administrator for everything that requires the Dynamics 365 UI.
- Use a Non-Interactive user for XrmToolbox and access to the make.powerapps.com interface.
- Bookmark this post to always have the direct url at hand 😉
[…] Log in to make.powerapps.com as a delegated administrator … […]
HELLo, I was wondering if there is a way to use Application User to create flow? Is there any possibility that than API call consumption will be counted towards application user? I would really APPRECIATE if you could provide me with some information if you have. Best regards, DZ
Hello, how can we found the [yourenvironmentid] ?
Hi There, I am new to powerapps and would like to understand the licensing cost. Suppose I dont have d365 license and not added as user in the d365 app but have powerapp license. now my developer have build an powerapp for me which is connected with d365 instance as data source however it gives me error saying you are not authorized to access the data source. so in such case how would i ensure that me and my colleagues are allowed to read/write/create data in D365 via power app without consuming d365 license. is that possible?
Hi Megh, I'm afraid that you will need a D365 license as soon as you write to the D365 entities. Don't hesitate to send me an email at nathan@thrives.be to discuss in depth!
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