To get the most from Power Platform, enterprises will have multiple environments. There are several multi-environment approaches but common ones include separating business units into their own environments, and/or to have development pipelines with development, QA, and production environments or similar. It is also very common for flows to move between environments, a pipeline being a prime example.

It is common for different environments to have a specific purpose and different functional needs. Cross-environment visibility, control, and coordination is crucial, especially as automation estates scale. This is what ALC provides.

ALC has a single, unified view across all the environments. When a flow moves across environments you see it. When flow-dependencies change from environment to environment you see that as well. All the applications being interacted with by flows are listed in a common catalog, independent of which environment the flows are in. Similarly, quality rules are applied across all environments to enforce standardization. These are just some examples of ALC's cross-environment capabilities.

From this single estate view, you can then drill into individual environments. Have several open at the same time in different browser tabs. Since environments have different purposes (e.g. a development environment is very different than a production environment), ALC lets you configure the UI to have only features that are relevant to the work being done in that environment.

Should you have flows that are not in an environment, but instead are in Solution Files outside of Power Platform, ALC can import those as well. In this case you won't have the ALC features that depend on having an environment such as flow-activity, logs, and tests, but the many features that do not require an environment are available.

An administrator must connect Blueprint to your Microsoft Power Platform, choose the environments that ALC will work with, and configure which ALC feature to make available in each environment (default is all ALC features).