Archive for category: Dynamics 365 Portals

Planning and licensing the PowerApps Portal

While there are so many pages of documentation around capacity planning and licensing the PowerApps Portal, when you get down to implementation, you often get confused and are stumped on encountering the unexpected!

We attempt to put forward an actual use case we encountered – 3 issue areas and how we resolved them.

Existing situation

• The Customer had purchased 10 CE licenses and 20 licenses across other plans (Enterprise Sales, etc.) from IOTAP, a Microsoft CSP Partner
• The Customer had a Dynamics Portal [ with Customer Service template] for their Dynamics 365 Production environment (Note: this was not a PowerApps Portal)
• A trial PowerApps Portals had been provisioned for their Dynamics Sandbox

Expectation, Issue, and Resolution

A) Issue area 1: Convert Free trial to Paid

• Expectation: We expected a “Convert to Paid” action available against the trial Portal in the admin
• Issues:
  • “Convert to Production”, was the only relevant action available – which was not what we wanted
  • The trial being a Customer Service template would fail conversion since 2 portals using the same template cannot co-exist in the same environment

    (Option available on PowerApps portal – for trial)

• Resolution:
  • “Convert to Production” actually meant – “Convert to Paid”
  • The portal link with Sandbox did not break and

B) Issue area 2: List of licensed users

• Expectation: The licensed user list for the Sandbox-linked PowerApps portal would list the 8 CE licensed users

(User licenses download from Admin Power Portal)

• Issues:
  • The list had only 2 of the 10 users as having PowerApps license.
  • There were users shown as having PowerApps for Office 365 – which was unexpected
  • The licenses assigned to the users seemed varied – across

(Excel downloaded from admin PowerPortal)

• Resolution:
  • From the Office 365 Admin, navigate to the user ➤ manage product License. Below the list of licenses, is the list of apps which is toggled close, by default. Click open and scroll down to the PowerApps.
  • Users who had them checked were the users who had shown up on the “active user” list downloaded from the PowerApp Portal
  • Users may have licenses assigned, but unless they were given access on the app, they cannot access the PowerApps Portal

C) Issue area 3: The Add-on to Purchase

• Expectation: The environment was Sandbox and was to be accessed infrequently. We needed a license option that would not be over-head. Some users who were not licensed via the CE license needed to access Sandbox for testing/ reviewing.
• Issues:
  • The per User license and the per login plan were Monthly plans which would go unused during most months.
  • There was no plan which was like the Azure Usage Plan which could be purchased and could be consumed until it was used up. A per-login plan with about 100 logins would be apt.
  • Adding and removing licenses for short periods would become cumbersome.
• Resolution:
  • The Per-user plan was selected – since it was cost-effective
  • The Client License administrator was encouraged to use the IOTAP Self Service Portal to add/ remove these licenses. He could do this easily along with managing the other Microsoft licenses provisioned from IOTAP.

(IOTAP self-service portal – manage licenses)

Also read, PowerApps Portals (Part 1)

Background

The PowerApps Portals provide one of the last missing pieces to the Power Platform story.

PowerApps Portals was announced in June as the successor to Dynamics 365 Portal. It will be fully decoupled from Customer Experience apps and will live alongside the two other types of PowerApps – Canvas and Model-driven. It has been promoted as a way to expose processes and data to external users with new mechanisms tied to Azure, PowerApps, and the Common Data Service [including Dynamics].

For Microsoft and other enterprise software vendors, exposing business systems data to non-licensed users has been a long-running point of contention. Customers have long been warned not to look for workarounds to purchasing licenses such as exposing data through reports or other customer application interfaces that avoid licensed interfaces. With the below changes, Microsoft expects to plug this gap and compliance issue –

• Putting together a new licensing model for Portals
• Implementing consumption measuring devices
• Simplifying for the Org to quickly onboard and
• Extending the platform with enhancements and integrations

Details below are based on information as is currently being shared by Microsoft – however, MS is still taking feedback from partners and trying to make some amendments to the licensing structure.

What is a PowerApps Portals?

A PowerApps Portal is a Low Code, responsive Website with the familiar WYSIWYG designer for easy branding, linkable to a CDS system. Users can interact with the data via authentication provided by enterprise authentication providers or anonymously. Information can be filtered, and security applied so that the external user can only see or interact with data that is specific to him or his role.

What is the CDS system?

CDS for simple understanding is an easy to manage, secure database with a prebuilt set of entities provided as a paid Azure Service.

While Dynamics 365 already uses CDS as the backend, data from multiple other data stores can be easily integrated into CDS and a unified experience across databases can be provided

Features of the PowerApps Portals

To understand its features simplistically – As an off-shoot of the Dynamics 365 portals, all of what can be done on the existing Dynamics Portals can be done on the PowerApps Portals too- and more. The biggest feature on the portal is the ease of building the PowerApps Portal. The Basic version of the portal can be set up easily by the business users, with drag and drop functionality. Advanced versions need Liquid consultants and developers

Features Compare and Contrast – Dynamics 365 Portals and PowerApps Portals

Skillsets needed to work on the PowerApps Portals

• Ability to code using Liquid code and JavaScript
• Experience around working with entities and processes
• Understanding of security roles and permissions
• WYSIWYG designing
• Understanding/ implementation of Authentication Providers [recommended is AzureB2C]

Pricing

Microsoft revealed new pricing and licensing for PowerApps Portals during Inspire but since then has been evolving and building on it.

Notable changes have been announced.

Pricing – Compare and Contrast – Dynamics 365 Portals and PowerApps Portals

PowerApps Portals – Licensing details

[as currently available for – Dt.9 Sept. 2019]

PowerApps Portals can be provisioned without requiring a specific license. They are charged only on Usage. Breaking down the Portal Users into Licensed and Non Licensed users, irrespective of whether they are internal or external –

1) Licensed users [Internal]

• A user having any PowerApp Plan license
• Dynamics 365 [various]

Users who have valid licenses will not be levied an additional usage charge

2) Non-Licensed users [Internal or External]

Microsoft differentiates between Anonymous [ not signed in] and Authenticated [signed in] users.

• Authenticated users
  • Access by authenticated users will be charged on a “per log-in”. A log-in is defined as a twenty-four-hour period of access by a single authenticated user/ app, chargeable monthly.
• Anonymous users
  • Anonymous portal users will be priced on a simple “per-page-view” model, chargeable monthly

3) Minimum licensing quantities

• Login quantity

The minimum login quantity to be assigned to a portal is 100 logins/month.

Once you have assigned 100 logins, you can assign them in units of 1.

•  Pageviews quantity:

Minimum 50,000 per portal, after that you can assign 1 at a minimum.

4) Additional portal instances

• Additional portal instances can be spun up without any additional charge.
• Monthly charge based on usage will be billable based on above permutations

5) Existing Dynamics 365 access to PowerApps Portals

Dynamics 365 Enterprise users will continue to be able to run apps and portals that extend and customize the licensed Dynamics 365 application, as long as those apps and portals [even if they are custom] are located in the same environment as their licensed Dynamics 365 application.

Custom apps or portals outside of the Dynamics 365 environment and access to his app license on Dynamics 365 will require a standalone PowerApps license.

The Team Member license does not get access to the custom portal as Team Member licenses do not allow access to a custom app.

Reference:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/admin/powerapps-flow-licensing-faq

Also read, PowerApps Portals (Part 2)

Dynamics 365 Portals are shipped with every Dynamics tenant* along with multiple ready to use templates that can be quickly configured and customized to suit business needs to build and extend channels of communication and Collaborate with specifically invited customers, partners or employees.

What are Dynamics 365 Portals?

• Portals are an External website platform which is deeply integrated into CRM
• They provide channels for various Customer Engagement Scenarios
• They are an opportunity to extend CRM modules to the web for external customers and partners, without the added burden of building, hosting and customizing

The Microsoft promise

• High Availability: 9% Guaranteed Uptime with Financially backed SLA
• Performance & Scalability: Enterprise-grade scale and Performance for your portals
• Disaster Recovery: Making sure your Portals are always up and running.
• Data Protection: Compliance with Microsoft Data protection standards to make sure your data is safe.
• Global Availability: Available Worldwide from your nearest Datacenter.
• Security: Modern TLS crypto standards, DDOS protection, X-site scripting protection, etc.

Listen to those who matter

THE PORTAL provides a single view to the customer of all his activities with your organization. Every single Account – be it Partner or a customer, has a distinct view of all his activities with your organization.

• Sales – Products Purchased, change Logs, Invoices
• Customer Service – Knowledgebase for Self-Service, Case history, Live Assist channel
• Marketing – White papers, Product Collateral, New Launches, events, news, and Webinars

Share and collaborate in real-time

The portal provides an Out of the box Collaboration tool in the form of forums. Easy Moderation capabilities and discussion views make responding to customer queries and discussion with Partners on Opportunities seamless and easy.

While the Support team resolves cases and creates the knowledge base articles in its routine daily activities, the same can be surfaced on the portal. Customers and partners can create and track queries and issues to closure and rely on Self- Service for any urgent issues. The Search feature and the classified display of KB is a default feature available on specific portal templates.

Engage – Interact with your customer

Embed a chat widget onto a portal to proactively engage with customers. Be it for sales inquiries or requests from partners or issues which need to be responded to and resolved, personal touch and availability of someone to address it, always creates a positive experience. Live Assist or any other Third-party app can easily integrate and reside within the Dynamics 365 portals.

Engage customers with a modern case management system, which can search through the Knowledge Base – one of the most powerful features of the platform – and scan through key terms and phrases to show results. Activities and correspondence tracking and quick views of Active and Resolved cases all reduce the burden on Call center and the helpdesk teams.

Transform – Leverage the platform for more

Dynamics 365 Portals literally has all the capability available in Dynamics and more.

Social collaboration – Polls, Discussion Forums, Knowledge Base Search, and Self Service are items just on the surface. Add to it, the mobile capability where its device ready and plays well even when you are on the move.

Surface your product and Service collateral and use the platform for marketing, highlight your featured products and enable the Sales team, share newsletters and webinar links and create a Knowledge store which becomes a reference Library for all, link it to an eCommerce portal and a payment gateway and shorten the sales-to-pay- time.

*Check the license requirements

Dynamics 365 Portal Invitation Issues

1. One of the available ways to invite a user to the portal is to generate an Invitation on a Contact and email this invitation with the one time “redemption code” to the user
2. Every invitation email sent has a unique invitation code which is valid only for the contact to whom it was emailed. It’s a long alphanumeric set of characters which is unique to the email id of this Contact.
3. In case this redemption link is redeemed by some other user before the intended user uses it, the intended user will not be able to log in. Further, if the incorrect user, later wants an invitation to the portal for his own profile, he too will face issues.

Follow the below steps, to fix the issue in such scenarios

• Consider “Invited Contact” as the contact to whom the portal invitation was sent and “Other Contact” as the contact who redeemed the invitation
• Open the “Other Contact” record in CRM and navigate to the Portal Contact form. Clear out the ‘User Name’ field and save the record. Navigate to ‘External Identities’ sub-grid and delete the applicable record.

• Open the “Invited Contact” record in CRM and navigate to the Portal Contact form and ensure that the ‘User Name’ field is blank. Navigate to ‘External Identities’ sub-grid and ensure that there are no records.
• Open Advanced Find, and search and delete the Invitation sent to the “Invited Contact”.

• Send a new invitation to the” Invited Contact” by clicking the Work365 ‘Sent Portal Invite’ button OR the OOTB Portal ‘Create Invitation’ button

Situation

• The Customer service Portal using Azure AD authentication was being used by the client to collaborate on products changelogs, consumption changes, Invoices, project documents and updates, customer service tickets and Company information management
• Customers have multiple users belonging to different departments who need to access the portal and review and update information in different capacities.
• Every time a new client stakeholder needs to be given access/ removed to the portal, the CRM admin team needed to action it.
• The onus of security of critical client information management was entirely on the CRM team.

Requirement

• Transfer onus of security:
  • CRM Admin to create one portal user from the customer Contacts who would have permission to create, update and deactivate other contacts from his organization – the client “portal user manager”

• Managing users:
  • He should be able to assign the required Roles and even create other Portal user managers.
  • He should be able to deactivate these users and also update their portal role if needed. However, they should not be deleted from CRM.
• User Access:
  • Users should be sent an invitation to be redeemed via email when they are created.

Solution

• Go to Portals ➤Web Roles and create web roles
  • Portal user manager
  • Portal Finance User
  • Portal IT User
  • Portal Project user
• Create a two-options field for each Web role above on the Contact entity
• Create a new web Contact form in CRM. Fields
  • Full Name
  • Account
  • Work Email address
  • Contact details
  • Web role two-options [for as many roles defined]
    • Go to field properties ➤ Formatting ➤ Control Formatting ➤ Select Checkbox
  • Is Portal contact
• Create a copy of the above form for the update contact process
• Create a view in CRM – “Show Portal Contacts”
  • Add filter Status Reason=Active and Is Portal Contact=Yes
• New Portal Contact page
  • Go to Portals ➤ Entity Forms ➤ New and Create new entity form for new Contact. Select mode as Insert.
    • Add the below script to set the ‘Is Portal contact ‘ to true and hidden

$(document).ready(function() {

$(‘#iotap_isportalcontact’).prop(‘checked’, true);

$(‘#iotap_isportalcontact’).hide();

 $(‘#iotap_isportalcontact_label’).hide();

});

• Go to Portals ➤ Web Pages ➤ New and Create web page for new contact entity form.

• Update Portal Contact page
  • Go to Portals ➤ Entity Forms ➤ New and Create new entity form for update Contact. Select mode as Edit.
  • Go to Portals ➤ Web Pages ➤ New and Create a web page for update contact entity form.
• The default “Invitation” entity and the workflow “send Invitation” will be used

Create an on-demand workflow on Contact entity to trigger when “Record is created” to associate web role and send a portal invitation when a new contact is created from the portal.

• Manage Users page
• Go to Portals ➤ Entity Lists ➤ New and enter Name, Entity Name-Contact(contact), Website-your website, click +view button select view “Show Contacts Portal” and then again select +view button and select “Active Contacts”
• Grid Configuration ➤ Item Actions ➤ +Edit and set Target Type as Entity Form, Entity Form- “Update Contact” and Button Label as “Edit”
• Grid Configuration ➤ Item Actions ➤ +Deactivate and set Button Label as “Deactivate”
• Go to Portals ➤ Web Pages ➤ New and create a web page for “Manage users” entity list
• Create a navigation Link – “Manage users” which is accessible only to the Portal user manager role
  • Go to Portals ➤ Web Link Sets ➤ Primary Navigation ➤ Links ➤ Add New Web Link with Name, Publishing state as Published, Parent WebLink as Home, Page as “Manage users”.
  • Go to Portals ➤ Web Page Access Control Rules ➤ New and create Access rule with Name, Right as “Restrict Read”, select “Web Page” and select “Web Role” “Portal user Manager”.
• Create a duplicate detection rule [if not available] based on the contact email Id, so that duplicate contacts are not created by the user manager.
  • Go to Settings ➤ Data Management ➤ Duplicate Detection Rules ➤ New
  • Publish.

• New button
  • Go to Portals ➤ Entity List->Select entity list “Manage users” set Web Page for create and Create Button Label as “New”

The completed customization

Also, check out Contact Management from Dynamics 365 Portal – Part 2