Boxcurve Unity: Administrator Guide
This guide describes the administrative capabilities of Boxcurve Unity, the Power Platform application that runs inside your own Microsoft 365 tenant. It is written for the IT, security and compliance staff who administer Boxcurve Unity after it is installed.
It covers the roles the application recognises, the tasks an administrator can perform from within the application, the activities that take place in Microsoft administration centres instead, and the reporting and monitoring available to administrators.
Throughout, the guide separates two things:
- what Boxcurve Unity provides, capabilities built into the application, and
- what you are responsible for, configuration and operation you perform in your own tenant, including activities that take place in Microsoft administration centres rather than in the application itself.
This guide concerns in-application administration only. Tenant-level and Power Platform administration are platform responsibilities and are described, with links to Microsoft's documentation, in Section 3.
1. Administrator roles
Boxcurve Unity recognises five application roles, listed below from the highest privilege to the lowest:
| Role | Scope |
|---|---|
| Administrator | The application's highest privilege level. Governs application-wide administration, including project lifecycle operations, user and role management, and configuration. |
| Operations Manager | An elevated operational role with broad access to project and task administration. |
| Project Manager | Manages projects in which the user participates. |
| Team Manager | Manages a team within a project. |
| User | Day-to-day participation in projects, without administrative capability. |
The two roles relevant to this guide are Administrator and Operations Manager, which carry elevated, administrative capability. The remaining roles govern day-to-day participation rather than administration of the application and are covered in the user-facing capability documentation.
Note on role labels. In the application these roles are currently presented with a "RACI" prefix, for example, the Administrator role appears as RACI Administrator and the Operations Manager role appears as RACI Ops Manager. This guide uses the functional names throughout.
How role membership is determined
Boxcurve Unity does not maintain its own private list of who holds each role. Instead, each project in the application is backed by a set of Microsoft 365 groups, one each for Administrators, Operations Managers, Project Managers and members. Membership of these groups determines the role a person holds. When the application starts, it reads the signed-in user's group membership and grants the corresponding role.
The application-wide Administrator and Operations Manager roles are the ones associated with the application's central ("Master") project. A user is treated as an administrator of the application when they belong to the Administrators group of that central project.
Because role membership is held in Microsoft 365 groups, adding or removing a person from a role is ultimately a change to group membership. Boxcurve Unity provides screens that perform these membership changes for you (see Section 2); the underlying group directory itself is a Microsoft 365 capability.
2. Administrative tasks in the application
Administrators carry out their work from two main areas of the application: the Settings screen (user, role and configuration management) and the Administration Dashboard (project lifecycle operations).
2.1 First-time setup
The first time Boxcurve Unity is opened in an environment that has not yet been initialised, the application checks whether the signed-in user holds the Power Platform System Administrator role for that environment. Only a System Administrator may perform first-time setup; any other user is shown a screen explaining that they are not a system administrator and listing the current environment system administrators, so that they know whom to contact.
During first-time setup the application creates its central ("Master") project together with its backing business unit and the Microsoft 365 groups that hold the Administrator, Operations Manager and member roles, and assigns the initial administrators, operations managers and users to that central project.
Granting a user the Power Platform System Administrator role is a platform task performed outside the application. See Microsoft's documentation: https://learn.microsoft.com/power-platform/admin/database-security
2.2 Managing users and roles
From the Settings screen an administrator can:
- Add a user to the application, and edit or remove an existing user.
- Bulk edit users and import users, for adding or updating users in larger numbers.
- Add and remove roles for a user.
- Assign project roles to users, including adding members to projects.
When an administrator assigns or removes a role, the application updates the corresponding Microsoft 365 group membership behind that role. Adding a user creates the user record the application needs; assigning roles then adds the user to the appropriate role groups for the relevant project. Removing a user removes them from the associated role groups and, as the application warns at the point of removal, they lose access to the application.
The application also offers options to add stakeholders by department and add stakeholders by security group, allowing groups of people to be brought into a project together rather than individually.
2.3 Project lifecycle administration
The Administration Dashboard provides project lifecycle operations for administrators. The following operations are available from this area:
| Operation | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Copy project | Create a copy of an existing project. |
| Backup project | Take a backup of a project. |
| Restore project | Restore a project from a backup. |
| Reset project | Reset the assignments within a project. |
| Delete project | Delete a project. |
| Archive project | Archive a project. |
| Create master/dev copy | Create a development copy from the central (Master) project. |
| Promote to master | Promote a development copy so that it becomes the central project. |
| Merge to master | Merge a project's tasks into the central project. |
The merge operation will not proceed when the two projects use different accountability-map formats (for example, one project in RACI and another in DACI); in that case the application reports that the projects cannot be merged because their formats differ.
2.4 Configuration the administrator maintains
In addition to users and projects, administrators maintain the application's reference and configuration data, including:
- Departments
- Categories
- Jurisdictions
- Task packs (reusable sets of tasks)
- Application and user settings
2.5 Licensing tier and premium features
Boxcurve Unity reads a licensing tier for the signed-in user and uses it to control access to certain features. Some content, for example premium task packs, is available only to higher licensing tiers; where a feature requires a higher tier than the current user holds, the application disables it and indicates that an upgrade is required.
The licensing tier itself is an entitlement that the application reads. Procuring and assigning that entitlement is arranged with Boxcurve and is not a configuration step performed inside the application.
2.6 Integration configuration
Boxcurve Unity can import tasks from, and synchronise with, external services. Setting up these integrations, for example connecting an external work-management board, is performed through the application's integration and import screens. The available connections and their setup are described in the Integrations & Connections guide; this guide notes only that integration configuration is an administrator activity carried out from within the application.
3. What is managed in Microsoft administration centres (platform behaviour)
Several activities that affect Boxcurve Unity are not performed in the application. They are platform responsibilities that you carry out in Microsoft administration centres or directory tools. These are labelled here as platform behaviour; Boxcurve Unity relies on them but does not manage them.
-
Granting the environment System Administrator role (a prerequisite for first-time setup) is a Power Platform administration task. See Microsoft's documentation: https://learn.microsoft.com/power-platform/admin/database-security
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Sign-in, identity, multi-factor authentication and single sign-on are handled by Microsoft Entra ID, not by Boxcurve Unity. See Microsoft's documentation: https://learn.microsoft.com/entra/identity/
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The underlying Microsoft 365 groups that back the application's roles are directory objects. While Boxcurve Unity changes their membership when you assign or remove roles in the application, the groups themselves are administered as Microsoft 365 / Entra ID objects. See Microsoft's documentation: https://learn.microsoft.com/entra/fundamentals/groups-view-azure-portal
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Platform licensing for the environment on which Boxcurve Unity runs is managed outside the application. See Microsoft's documentation: https://learn.microsoft.com/power-platform/admin/pricing-billing-skus
Boxcurve Unity can report the current environment system administrators (so that non-administrators know whom to contact), but assigning that platform role is done in the platform administration centre, not in the application.
4. Reporting and monitoring available to administrators
Boxcurve Unity provides reporting and monitoring within the application:
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Reporting screen. Provides reporting views including an overall view, a personal hub and a team view, together with views of changes, tasks added to and removed from the current project, assigned departments, and overall changes. These views let an administrator review activity and assignment changes across a project.
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Change Log. The application maintains a change log that records changes to tasks and related records, available for review from the relevant screens.
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User counts per project. The application can produce counts of users per project broken down by role type, giving administrators a view of how many people hold each role on each project.
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Error Log. The application records its own operational errors in an error log that administrators can review from the Administration Dashboard.
5. How Boxcurve Unity is updated and deployed in your tenant
Boxcurve Unity is delivered and updated as a Power Platform managed solution. New versions are released as solution updates that you apply on your own schedule, rather than by editing the live application directly.
- The application is supplied as a managed solution. A managed solution is locked: it changes only when you apply a new release, not through ad-hoc edits in the environment.
- Each release carries its own version. Read the version currently in force from the deployed solution in your environment rather than assuming a fixed number.
- Releases to your production and pre-production environments are applied only after explicit approval.
How updates are scheduled, approved and rolled out is covered in full in the Updates & Change Management document; it is summarised here only to set administrator expectations.