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Dynamics 365 Community / Forums / Microsoft Dynamics CRM (Archived) / Portal testing ideas a...
Microsoft Dynamics CRM (Archived)
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Portal testing ideas after local account deprecation

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Posted on by TopBadger 97

Hi All,

I've been told that MS have deprecated local portal user accounts for D365 portals, in the future all will be external accounts. They're still there today, but not sure how long this will be the case.

The thing is, I find local portal user accounts to be a very convenient way of testing behavior - I've previously created a number of dummy accounts, with dummy contacts holding different web roles. Its then trivial to log in with each dummy account to make sure the views and actions are the correct scope for each dummy user. What with GDPR and other regulations it's important to check the business isn't 'over sharing' the data within CRM.

Once local accounts are removed, i'm not sure how i'd achieve this as simply as i can now.

Anyone here do something similar and have thoughts on how best to approach portal testing with dummy data?

*This post is locked for comments

  • Nicholas Hayduk Profile Picture
    Nicholas Hayduk 2,863 on at

    Hi,

    We also often use local accounts for testing because they are convenient.  However, if you're using an external identity provider, it's not really that much harder to setup something similar.  If you use Azure AD B2C, you can create dummy accounts on your favorite platform and use them on all of your implementations.  You still get contacts for all of those accounts that you can associate web roles to for testing, so it's not much different.  In fact, if you're dealing with different environments, sharing the dummy external accounts can save a bit of password management.

    Also, while yes I've heard the same thing that they are going to be depreciated, I think it's probably still a while before that happens (and actually the note about depreciation isn't on the documentation anywhere).  There are a lot of people who use them who would need to migrate.  My best guess is this is years (not weeks or months) away from actually happening, or at least many, many months.

    Hope that helps.

    Nick

  • Nicholas Hayduk Profile Picture
    Nicholas Hayduk 2,863 on at

    Just as a follow up, I was able to confirm that local authentication is definitely still deprecated, so it's best to get familiar with the other authentication providers, preferably Azure AD B2C.

    Nick

  • TopBadger Profile Picture
    TopBadger 97 on at

    Thanks Nick,

    We tried Azure AD B2C and found it to be terrible and largely undocumented. We use a different external provider. But yes, I guess we'd better get used to operating without local accounts

  • NicolasBrandl Profile Picture
    NicolasBrandl 170 on at

    Hi, can you share where the deprecation notice was posted? I was searching Microsoft docs and I couldn't find it.

    If you look at the  Configure Portal Authentication page in MS docs here: docs.microsoft.com/.../configure-portal-authentication there is no notice for such deprecation.

  • Nicholas Hayduk Profile Picture
    Nicholas Hayduk 2,863 on at

    The deprecation notice was removed.

    My understanding is that while Microsoft does intend on deprecating it, they can't until all of the Azure regions support Azure AD B2C, which is not the case yet. So the notice was remove until that happens. But long term, I still believe it will be going away.

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