August 2020 – Mohsin Khalid

Since Microsoft came out with their new licensing around the Power platform breaking the power apps licenses and power automate licenses apart there has been a lot of questions in the community forums and generally on how are power automates getting licensed. Short answer to that question is there are now two licensing options available if someone would like to enjoy the power of power automate and power automate is not included in the license options for power apps.

Power automate per user plan
Power automate per Flow plan

The per user plan is quite self explanatory and the license is assigned to the user like the previous power apps plan 1 and plan 2 licenses, this has a lower limit than the expensive per flow plan but does allow that particular user to create unlimited number of flows for themselves. The power automate per Flow plan has a different process of assignment to the Flow. In order to assign the per flow plan to your flow. First you have to procure the license which comes in a bundle of 5( yes you have to buy minimum 5 flows costing $500/ month) and then you can buy an additional each for $100. Once the licenses are visible in your tenant. You will start to see the below Add on option in your Admin power platform portal under capacity.

Under Add-ons you will see all the flow licenses you purchased and will get the option to assign to one of your CDS environments

Select the environment you will be running your flows in, assign the number of flows and click on Save. Once done goto your flow in that environment and click on edit. The Per-flow option that is disable by default will become available.

With flow capacity assigned:

For more info on flow licensing. please visit https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/admin/powerapps-flow-licensing-faq

I also recommend you take the time and read the latest (As of July 2020) licensing guide, https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=2085130

If you would like to understand what are solutions and how to use them please visit my previous two posts where I talk about How to create a solution and how to create a solution patch. In this post we will see how we can merge the patches we created and create a Major version update of the solution for release.

To start off we will create another patch on top of the existing 9.1.0.0 base solution and the patch 9.1.1.0

To create another patch, select the base solution and click on Clone a Patch

This will create the second patch and versioning will stay in order

To create a major release we will follow what is called the cloning process. The good thing about following the patch approach and sticking to the recommended versioning is that our cloning will merge all patches together along with the base solution when we create a major version. In order to do so we will select the base solution, in this case 9.1.0.0 and click on Clone Solution

As we can this time the process recommends the next major version which is 9.2.0.0 instead of 9.1.3.0. When we click save the base solution and all patches will be merged automatically and we will end up with a single solution versioned as 9.2.0.0 this will be the solution we export in order to do a version upgrade at the managed box end (more on that in later posts)