PowerApps Portals (Part 2)
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)