Working with Power Automate Solutions: What Types of Solution Are There?

This article is part of the Working with Power Automate Solutions series and of the larger Working with Power Automate series I am writing on my experiences working with the Power Automate, which is part of the Power Platform from Microsoft. I also have a related series of articles on Power Automate with Microsoft Dynamics 365 BC.

As I briefly mentioned in the last post, where I introduced solutions, there are two types of solution:

1. Unmanaged
2. Managed

Unmanaged solutions are used in development environments while the flows are being created or maintained. Unmanaged solutions can be exported either as unmanaged or managed; it is recommended that exported unmanaged versions of your solutions be checked into your source control system.

When an unmanaged solution is deleted, only the solution container is deleted; all of the unmanaged flows and other components remain in place.

Managed solutions are used to deploy to any environment that isn’t a development environment; this includes QA, UAT and production environments.

As an ALM best practice, managed solutions should be generated by exporting an unmanaged solution as managed and considered a build artifact. Managed solutions can be serviced independently from other managed solutions in an environment.

Some of the key features of a managed solution are:

• Managed solutions cannot be exported.
• When a managed solution is deleted (uninstalled), all of the flows and other components within it are removed.
• Components in a managed solution cannot be directly edited. To edit managed components, they must first be added to an unmanaged solution. When this is done, a dependency between the unmanaged customisations and the managed solution is created. When a dependency exists, the managed solution can’t be uninstalled until the dependency is removed.
• Some managed components can’t be edited. To verify whether a component can be edited, view the Managed properties.

Further information on solutions in general and the types of solution are available on Microsoft Learn.