Solutions

A solution in the Power Platform and Dynamics 365 CRM-side apps is a versioned, deployable container of customisations: tables, columns, forms, views, business rules, Power Automate flows, canvas apps, model-driven apps, security roles, Copilot Studio agents, and many other component types. Solutions are the unit of application lifecycle management — develop in one environment in an unmanaged solution, export as a managed package, import to UAT and production. Solutions can be unpacked into XML/YAML files for source control with the pac CLI, enabling Git-based development, code review, and CI/CD pipelines. The right ALM discipline in Power Platform begins with solutions.

In practice, the unmanaged-to-managed pipeline is what makes solutions the actual deployment unit rather than just an organisational folder: makers build and iterate freely in an unmanaged solution in a development environment, then export it as a locked managed package for every environment downstream — test, UAT, production. Editing directly in a managed environment is possible (through a managed layer) but is not the intended development pattern, and doing it routinely defeats the whole point of having a controlled release pipeline.

Where confusion shows up: a component (a table, a flow) can belong to more than one solution at once, and deleting it from one solution doesn't remove it from the environment if another solution still references it — this trips up makers who expect "remove from solution" to mean "delete the component." Solution dependencies are also a real constraint, not just documentation: importing a solution that references a component another, not-yet-imported solution owns will fail outright, which is why import order matters in any multi-solution deployment.