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Key Considerations When Selecting a Portal

Post Author: Joe D365 | March 23rd, 2018

The primary purpose of a portal solution is to create a gateway for your customers or business partners to have a full self-service experience. Typically, this will include integration into your Dynamics 365 solution and enable external parties access to the following:

  • Accounts, orders and contracts
  • Financial operations
  • Knowledge base articles
  • Forums and blogs
  • Cases and support team members
  • Jobs, resources and various types of scheduling
  • Customer feedback surveys
  • Alerts and notifications

When selecting a portal solution to connect to your Dynamics 365 environment there are two key choices that include the Microsoft Dynamics Portals solution and the XRM Portal Community Edition.

Key considerations when selecting one of these technologies include:

Microsoft Dynamics Portals

  • Only available as a cloud service
  • One environment is free if you have over 5 professional users
  • $500 USD per month for each additional environment
  • Enhanced by Microsoft on an annual bases
  • Limited extensibility
  • Availability and backups are guaranteed by Microsoft
  • Recommended for companies with minimal technical capabilities

XRM Portal Community Edition

  • Can be implemented as a cloud service or on premises
  • Free and Open source
  • Unlimited extensibility
  • Limited documentation or technical support
  • Enhanced and updated by a portal community
  • More control over security, performance and availability
  • Recommended for companies with advanced technical capabilities

In conclusion, there are tremendous benefits to implementing a portal solution and enabling your partners and customers access to data within your Dynamics 365 environment. However, when selecting portal technology, companies need to define the business benefits and determine how much control they will want when it comes to managing and extending their portal solution.

Stay tuned for more portal and Dynamics 365 information and contact us if you have any questions!

Happy Dynamics 365 Portal'ing!

Joe CRM
By Joe D365
Joe D365 is a Microsoft Dynamics 365 superhero who runs on pure Dynamics adrenaline. As the face of PowerObjects, Joe D365’s mission is to reveal innovative ways to use Dynamics 365 and bring the application to more businesses and organizations around the world.

One comment on “Key Considerations When Selecting a Portal”

  1. Nice to see the comparison. Would be good to acknowledge that there are other viable solutions that could be used, such as "The portal connector" or Umbraco+Chorus, off the top of my head.
    Cheers Simon

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