The Default Solution in Power Platform
If you work with Microsoft Power Platform, you’ve almost certainly interacted with the Default Solution sometimes without even realizing it. It’s always there, automatically available in every Dataverse environment, and often the first place people land when exploring apps, flows, or tables.
But while the Default Solution is convenient, it’s not designed for serious production development. Understanding what it is and how it should (and shouldn’t) be used can save you from long-term maintenance headaches.
What Is the Default Solution?
The Default Solution is a system-managed solution that contains all components in a Dataverse environment. This includes tables, columns, apps, Power Automate flows, relationships, forms, views, and more.
Because it contains everything, the Default Solution provides a complete, centralized view of your environment. However, it has important limitations:
- It cannot be exported
- It cannot be deleted
- It should not be customized directly for production work
Think of the Default Solution as a reference layer useful for visibility, but not a delivery vehicle.
When the Default Solution Is Useful
The Default Solution shines in a few specific scenarios:
- Learning and exploration
New to Power Platform? The Default Solution helps you understand how components relate to each other.
- Quick prototyping
For experiments or throwaway work, it’s fine just don’t let prototypes become production.
- Troubleshooting and investigation
This is where it really earns its keep.
Practical Use Case: Troubleshooting Dependencies
Imagine a Power Automate flow fails in production because a column is missing, renamed, or unexpectedly referenced. That column might live in a different solution than the app or flow you’re troubleshooting.
The Default Solution lets you:
- Quickly locate related components
- See dependencies across multiple solutions
- Understand relationships without modifying anything
Used this way, the Default Solution is a powerful diagnostic tool.
Why Building in the Default Solution Is Risky
Problems arise when teams treat the Default Solution as a development workspace. In production scenarios, this can lead to:
- No proper ALM or versioning
You can’t track changes or promote them cleanly between environments.
- Hidden dependencies
Components silently depend on each other, causing deployment failures later.
- Hard-to-debug changes
With everything mixed together, it’s difficult to identify what changed and why.
- Environment drift
Dev, Test, and Prod slowly diverge, making fixes unpredictable and risky.
In short, what feels faster early on becomes technical debt very quickly.
Best Practices to Follow
To avoid these pitfalls:
- Create a solution early, even for small projects
- Treat the Default Solution as read-only
- Develop in unmanaged solutions
- Deploy managed solutions to production
- Move components out of the Default Solution as soon as possible
These practices support clean ALM, predictable deployments, and long-term maintainability.
Final Thought
The Default Solution isn’t the problem—misuse is.
Use it for visibility, exploration, and troubleshooting. But when it comes to building production apps, flows, and automations, create a solution and leave the Default Solution exactly where it belongs.
It enforces governance, scalability, auditability, reliability, consistency, safety, ownership, compliance.
Your future self (and your release pipeline) will thank you.
