Portal Troubleshooting: Introduction and Navigation

Hello everyone, and thanks for stopping by the newly launched portals support blog!  If you’ve stumbled upon this area of the Dynamics 365 Community, then you are likely already familiar with portals, the web-based frontend application for Dynamics 365 that is otherwise known as the “Portal Add-on” service.  Since we have just crossed over into a new year and there has been a lot of excitement and demand for portals since it launched last year, it seems like the appropriate time to launch this blog, and we’ll begin by inaugurating this new corner of the Internet with a series that covers common troubleshooting scenarios.

With the addition of a portal, an organization can introduce a tremendous amount of functionality to their Dynamics 365 implementation, expand their online presence in many different directions, and build a community of loyal customers that can share feedback, contribute to discussions about your products and services, raise support issues, and much more.  Providing a means for our customers to efficiently help their customers is paramount to Microsoft.

As the information contained on your portal and its importance to your business grows, ensuring that the portal is always readily accessible by your administrative team and your external customers is of the utmost importance.  While Microsoft has a team of support engineers who are willing and able to assist with any portal-related issues, there are moments when diagnosing and resolving an issue on your own is the most effective and efficient solution.  To empower you with the knowledge necessary to do just that, this initial blog series will focus on covering some of the more common problems with portals and how they can ultimately be resolved.

This series will be a work-in-progress and will be updated when new issues are discovered or previous issues are addressed in the product itself.  For the sake of reference and easier navigation, I’ll also be listing each of the issues that are covered across the entirety of this series below so that you can quickly jump to the installment that covers the specific issue you’re most interested in:

• The portal is showing stale data after updating records in Dynamics 365 (Part One)
• An authentication error occurs when signing into the portal with Azure AD (Part One)
• The contents of a Web Page are inaccurate due to duplicate Partial URLs (Part Two)
• An “Access Denied” error occurs when navigating to one or more Web Pages (Part Two)
• When attempting to uninstall a portal solution, a dependency error is received (Part Three)
• Cache invalidation is not functioning correctly on a version 7.x portal (Part Four)
• Date/time values displayed on a portal do not reflect the desired formatting (Coming Soon!)

Once again, thanks for stopping by the Dynamics 365 Community!  I hope that you find the information contained within this series useful and relevant when going through the deployment of your portal.