DynamicsMinds 2026 Preview: Governing Dynamics 365 CE with Managed Environments

DynamicsMinds 2026 is coming up in Portoroz, Slovenia, May 25-27, 2026. As a media partner of the event, MSDW will be speaking with presenters from the community to learn more about their sessions and event plans. 

Cole Haddock, a Microsoft MVP and a Solution Architect for Dynamics 365 CE and Power Platform, will be presenting three sessions at this year’s event exploring themes like getting Dynamics data into Microsoft Fabric and governance in managed environments. 

The latest environment management tools

“Over the last five years, or so, Microsoft has been slowly moving features, functions, and so forth under managed environments. When you set up an environment, you can have environment rules,” said Haddock, a 15-year veteran of Microsoft business applications and a Dynamics solution architect at Vanguard.

When setting up large deployments, managed environments offer ways to streamline access controls. For instance, users might want to set up different dev and prod environments with different access levels, then in a managed environment, create groups and put environments into those groups. Once resources are in a group, the environment rules come into play. 

An environment group allows administrators to set rules that apply to all environments, which takes some control away from the local builder or maker admin. The result, says Haddock, is better enterprise control. For example, in a dev environment, an admin could limit how often data is backed up or limit sharing with copilots. 

Haddock said that advanced connector controls sold him on the value of managed environments. 

“For decades, all we’ve had is DLP—data loss prevention control–now called policies,” he explained. Users had limited controls over the use of a Dataverse connector but couldn’t easily block them. “What was missing was an ability to control at the action level. Now with managed environments, you can apply controls within the managed environment.” 

He noted that default environments are the ones that most organizations probably want to keep locked down the most, and he will be going into more detail in his session. For example, an organization might want a production environment for HR, but wouldn’t want easy deployment across multiple environments for cybersecurity reasons. 

With the improved controls available today, you can go into connector level controls and say “I want to allow Dataverse calls,” Haddock explained. Using a setting called Select an environment, admins can limit controls at the action level, a change that he sees as a game changer for control and preventing data exfiltration. So far, the feature is in public preview.

For now, a premium user license is needed with Dynamics 365 Sales, Power Automate, or Power Apps to use these features. Haddock explained that there is often confusion over the licensing rules. Currently, only users consuming these features actually need a license.

Growing importance of Fabric and Application Insights

Apart from his regular work on Dynamics 365 solutions, Haddock has also been exploring Microsoft Fabric and Azure Monitor Application Insights.

“Fabric is in my eyes the gateway to getting to your data, along with using Azure Synapse and using infrastructure as code.” And he believes Azure Application Insights can offer a trove of data that Dynamics 365 customers have been long been asking for. 

Using a pre-determined schema, Application Insights can output as many as 40 different pre-set reports related to customer applications. Together with Fabric, it can be used for reporting purposes. 

Haddock and fellow MVP Joe Griffin plan to present a session on emerging Fabric and Application Insight capabilities. 

“He’s a pro-coder, so we look at it from both [perspectives]. I’ll show you how it works out of the box.”

Returning to DynamicsMInds

Last year was Cole’s first time attending DynamicsMinds. He came away impressed by the keynote and event organization as a whole, particularly the ability to follow themes from year to year. With his sessions as one example, he thinks that Fabric and data agents will be recurring themes throughout. 

“It wouldn’t be a Microsoft-related conference unless you talked about agents,” he added. “MCP servers weren’t a thing last year, or declarative agents [so those will definitely be discussed].” 

And he credited the organizing team with making the event a great experience that attendees and presenters want to return to. 

“Somebody asked me if I could go to one conference a year in Europe, what would it be. I will say out of the conferences I’ve been to, I’m going to DynamicMinds. I think it’s one of the most well-executed conferences I’ve ever been a part of. The content is always good. Go talk to speakers after sessions. It’s very personable and that’s what I love about it. You should go if you haven’t and you should go again if you’ve been before.”