Enterprise templates - an oxymoron

The problem with the Power Platform is that it’s a platform, not an application. You don’t get any readymade apps or automations with it. Instead, you need to build them, or buy them from a Microsoft partner, after you’ve acquired the necessary licenses to use the platform.

With any such tools for the makers, the vendor usually provides some example templates to help the users get started. To see for themselves what could be built on top of the platform. This is a model Microsoft has followed with Power Apps, Power Automate and most of its products. The makers have been shown a list of template apps or flows to choose from, in addition to starting from scratch.

Enterprise templates for Power Platform were a much more ambitious initiative. Here’s the announcement post from 2023:

Ryan Cunningham’s post boldly states that “these new templates are not training tools for beginners — they are designed to be accelerators for rapid transformation in production.” Targeting finance, HR, and IT management processes, the business case for enterprise templates was to drive the adoption of premium Power Apps licenses by offering solutions using Dataverse and model-driven apps.

Today, when you open the Catalog in Power Platform, by selecting it in the App/Automate maker portal, you’ll discover a list of templates published by Microsoft. Many of these are categorized as Enterprise Templates:

Cool, we have an easy way to deploy robust accelerators for common enterprise scenarios right from within the product. Isn’t that amazing?!?

Deployment is just one part, though. Where do you go for getting more details about the contents and supported extensions methods for these templates? Today, the answer is: nowhere. Because it seems Microsoft has deleted all the MS Learn pages referencing Enterprise templates for Power Platform. We can only find some of the pages via the internet archive.

The URLs once used for template specific content now direct to the home pages of Microsoft AppSource. In there, you can find some of the apps, such as Training and Registration, Hardware Request and Management, Employee Kudos, and so on. No common page exists for these, instead they are just random templates from MS in the store, among many similar one-off releases.

Wasn’t this supposed to be something a bit more consistent than just some Power CAT example solutions thrown out into the world? In 2024 there were still pretty nice slide decks shown about the application templates available / coming soon, grouped under “Power for Finance,” “Power for HR,” and “Power for IT”:

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