When to integrate Your existing Customer Portal with Dynamics 365? What are the available options? [video]

In previous articles, we discussed the pros and cons of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Portal compared to Custom Portal. And how to decide which you need. Today I will talk about the integration of your existing portal with Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement. I’m Dynamics 365 technical architect with 12 years’ experience with Dynamics platform and I’d like to share my experience with you.

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First, let’s talk about the pros/cons and questions­

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Key advantages of integration of existing portal with Dynamics are 

• Fewer efforts if the portal is already available
• Dynamics 365 is a flexible platform with REST/JSON API available and easy to integrate
• There are no-code third-party solutions to publish web forms on the portal
• Independent development teams and roadmaps for Dynamics and Portal

But, there some concerns, such as 

• Integration might be technically complicated
• Portal developers need help to consume Dynamics API since it can be tricky (especially authentication and data structure/field names)
• For larger projects, direct Dynamics API access might be not the best option

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So how can you decide whether you need to integrate your existing portal with Dynamics or not?­

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Try to answer these questions

• Do you have customer portal already?
• Is your company satisfied with it and don’t want to replace?
• Do you have a team to build integration with Dynamics or have a budget for external consultants?
• Do you have somebody with Dynamics 365 background to consult you?­

If you answered YES to most of the questions, I recommend you to consider these options: 

• Use Dynamics 365 API. If you are using this option please ensure you have somebody with Dynamics 365 background to build API samples for your development team since it can be tricky.

• It is worth to mention you can build no-code web site integrations with third-party tools. If you just want to collect lead data and subscriptions from the website, please check ClickDimentions forms

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That’s it for now. You can contact us directly with questions about your requirements and situation. Please fill free to get advice on your specific case.

This article originally appeared on UDS blog by Roman Savran.