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What is Microsoft Dynamics 365 Portal and how to decide if you need one? [video]

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What is the best customer portal for your business? How different portals solve different problems?

I’m Dynamics 365 technical architect with 12 years’ experience with this product working from the very first versions.

Latest years shows high interest in Web Portals implementation, so I decided to share experience me and my team got implementing Portals for different customers over the Globe. Investigating implementation options for Dynamics Portal might be challenging.

Many different options are available on the market, but how not to spend tons of money and be not satisfied with the result.

  • Is Microsoft provided portal good for my company?
  • Should we build implementation from scratch?
  • Is WordPress compatible with Dynamics?

There is no single solution that fits all the answer, so I’ll share my experience to help you to decide. You can either read the article or watch a video.

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Available Portal options

So first the best option will depend on your requirements, there is no best-for-all solution.

Let us start by examining different options.

  • Microsoft Dynamics Portal
  • Build from scratch portal
  • Integrating existing portal with Dynamics 365

In this article, we will discuss Microsoft Dynamics Portal.

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Microsoft Dynamics Portal key advantages and concerns

In case you have more than 5 professional licenses it will be free in your case. However, if you need test and dev environments you might need to purchase an extra license and it will cost you near 500 USD/month depending on your area.

Key advantages of using Microsoft portal are:
  • Tight integration with Microsoft Dynamics
  • No code deployment and customization
  • Flexible extension options
  • Reduced deployment and maintenance cost
There are several concerns as well:
  • Limited flexibility in performance customizations
  • A little bit outdated technology
  • Problems making very specific UI
  • Not very suitable for integrating with multiple platforms if portal spans over several systems

 

So, when to go with Microsoft Dynamics Portal?

If you answer these questions positively this might be your choice:

  • Do you want to implement the solution fast?
  • Do you have a limited budget and want to use as much OOB functionality as possible?
  • Are you flexible in terms of UI/UX requirements and can adapt to available options?
  • Are you using Dynamics 365 online?

Thank you for reading my article. Next time I will talk about building a Portal from scratch and integrating your existing portal with Dynamics 365.

This article originally appeared on UDS blog by Roman Savran.

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