For years the Power Platform Center of Excellence (CoE) Starter Kit was the answer to a simple question: how do I see and govern everything makers are building across my tenant? It gave admins an inventory, a way to find orphaned apps, a connector audit, a DLP editor and a Power BI dashboard - all for free, all built on the platform itself. As of 2026 that answer has changed. Microsoft has retired active development of the kit and moved its core into the admin center. If your governance depends on the CoE, this is what you need to know.
The short version: The CoE Starter Kit is no longer maintained - no new features, no bug fixes, security issues only. Its bread-and-butter capabilities now live natively in the Power Platform admin center as Inventory, Usage, Monitor and Actions, plus data policies and Managed Environments. Most of it is there. A few things - notably DLP impact analysis, maker compliance workflows and ROI of ideas - are not. And the controls admins lean on most sit behind premium Managed Environments licensing. This piece is current as at 6 July 2026; the platform is moving fast, so verify before you rely on it.
Download the full guide (PDF) "The CoE Starter Kit is retired. What to use now." - the complete capability-by-capability map, the gaps, and the 2026 roadmap. Current as at 6 July 2026.
What Microsoft actually said
Every CoE Starter Kit page on Microsoft Learn now opens with the same notice:
"The Power Platform CoE Starter Kit is no longer actively maintained. Its core capabilities are part of the Power Platform admin center. Issues are no longer reviewed or addressed. If you identify a potential security issue, please report it to the Microsoft Security Response Center."
And on what that means in practice:
"The CoE Starter Kit remains available for existing and new deployments, but it will not be enhanced with new capabilities … Organizations are encouraged to use the Power Platform admin center as the central experience for governance, monitoring, and insights."
So the kit still installs and still runs - but it has stopped moving. Field reporting puts the end of monthly releases at February 2026 and Microsoft's confirmation that the kit is no longer maintained at around May 2026. There is no formal end-of-support date, so no hard deadline. But there is also no reason to build new governance on a tool that is now legacy.
Where each capability lives now
Microsoft maps the CoE to four in-product experiences in the Power Platform admin center (PPAC): Inventory, Usage, Monitor and Actions, backed by data policies and Managed Environments. Here is the map for the capabilities most teams actually rely on.
| What the CoE did | Native home today | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Tenant-wide inventory of apps, flows, agents, environments, makers | PPAC Inventory - unified view, updated within 15 minutes, exportable to Excel | GA |
| Find resources owned by departing users (orphaned) | Inventory ("resources owned by departing users") and Actions ("apps without valid owners"); reassign via Share or PowerShell | GA |
| Find and retire inactive resources | Actions ("apps not used in the last 60 days") and the Managed Environments weekly digest | GA (digest needs Managed Env.) |
| Connector usage and audit | Inventory Connectors column | Preview |
| Create and manage DLP / data policies | PPAC Data policies - Business / Non-business / Blocked, action control, endpoint filtering, agents and desktop flows | GA |
| DLP impact analysis | No direct native equivalent - assess manually from Inventory data | Gap |
| Tenant reporting / CoE Power BI dashboard | Inventory and Usage in-product; export to Azure Data Lake for custom BI | Inventory GA; export preview |
| Adoption and usage analytics | PPAC Usage page | Preview (GA Aug 2026) |
| Audit / activity history | Microsoft Purview activity logging | GA |
| Proactive sharing limits, maker welcome | Managed Environments | GA (premium) |
The line to watch is licensing. Inventory and data policies work on any tenant. But the parts administrators lean on most - the full detail and one-click remediation on the Actions page, the weekly digest, sharing limits - are part of Managed Environments, a premium capability. Microsoft is explicit that the Actions page detail is "available for the managed environments in your tenant", while non-managed environments see only a summary. If proactive governance matters to you, budget for it.
What native does not yet replace
Microsoft is candid about the unfinished edges. On the comparison with Managed Environments, Learn states:
"The CoE Starter Kit offers capabilities that aren't yet met with managed environments, such as bulk updating permissions, cleaning up abandoned resources, surveying makers, and calculating the ROI of ideas."
In practice, the gaps to plan around today are DLP impact analysis (no native tool to tell you what a policy change will break), maker-driven compliance workflows, bulk permission changes at scale, connector detail beyond raw IDs, long-run reporting past the native 28-day window without the Data Lake export, and the whole community and nurture layer - App Catalog, training, maker surveys, ROI of ideas.
What is coming
Microsoft's 2026 release wave 1 (April to September 2026) invests heavily here. The Usage page reaches general availability in August 2026. An Agentic Center of Enablement - an AI governance agent that continuously monitors the tenant to "detect risk, prioritize issues, and automate remediation plans" - enters public preview in July 2026, aimed squarely at the manual clean-up the CoE used to script. Near-real-time operational health, connector dependencies inside Inventory, and self-service analytics export to Azure Data Lake are all rolling out. Microsoft's standard caution applies: projected functionality may not be released, and dates move. And the next wave, 2026 wave 2, is not yet published - so anything beyond this list is not yet on the public roadmap.
The Governance view
This is the Governance pillar of our GIVE framework in its least glamorous, most useful form: knowing what makers are building, controlling what data it can touch, and keeping the tenant clean. Our advice is measured. For a new or low-maturity tenant, do not stand up a retiring tool to get inventory and DLP you already have natively - deliver it in PPAC and Managed Environments. Decide the Managed Environments licensing question early, because several controls depend on it. Bridge the real gaps deliberately - a documented manual process, a single targeted CoE component kept with eyes open, or a third-party tool - rather than reinstalling the whole kit for one feature. And if you already run the CoE, keep it while it works, stop investing in customisations, and move your core governance onto native as the features mature.