Dynamics Community Forum Thread Details

Dynamics Portals: User Management - Multiple Contacts with Same Email Address

Good afternoon all,

I am looking for some guidance on Portal User Management. I have an issue where if a portal user's email address exists more than once in our current CRM instance (2016 On-Prem) the password recovery fails. No error, it just does nothing.

We are currently starting a project where we will be migrating to Dynamics 365 Online and deploying a new portal, however my boss is adamant that the data we currently have, duplicates and all need to stay in the system. I have argued against this over and over again to no avail.

So my question is twofold:

Is there a way to modify the password recovery functionality to force them to input their account name or username alongside their email address to increase the chances of a password reset email being sent?
Are there any guides out there on the best way to manage CRM contacts where the same contact must exist (with same details) against multiple accounts? The logic behind this is that a single person may own more than one business and these businesses will be distinct separate entities, separate billing and products or services.

It's not an ideal setup by any stretch of the imagination, but needs must....I am just hoping you Guru's can point me in the direction of a solution.

Thanks in advance,

David

Hi David,

Your situation is very interesting as I would totally agree that the data needs to be modified in order to adhere to the portal standards. Generally, if a user is a portal contact then they should have a unique email address, even if you are using the username as the login provider.

That being said, I took a look at the backend portal code based on the Open Source Community Edition found here and the Forgot Password service does in fact retrieve only ONE contact based on the emailaddress1 field.

I'll take a stab are your questions:

There is no way to change how this functionality works unfortunately. It is custom built into the page template and can't be adjusted. What you could do is remove this page altogether and build out a custom process that would suit your needs. What we have done in the past for some of our clients is build a custom "Password Reset Request" entity inside of CRM and provided an Entity Form on a page that allows the user to submit this request. On this form you could have email and username, and whatever other information you require. Inside of CRM, you would have a plugin or process run on create (or approval/status change) of the Password Reset Request entity and attempt to retrieve the Contact based on Email - if more than one is retrieved then retrieve based on email and username. Once retrieved you would then build out a custom password reset process, whether that be trying to mimic the portal functionality (not sure if this is possible using the codes/keys that are generated for password reset) or allowing the user to just enter new password details into the form which you would use to call the Reset Password process in CRM (workflow/action).
In order for a contact to manage multiple accounts you would have to keep a single contact and build a 1:N (or N:N) relationship to the Account entity. In the portal, anytime you view information in the Entity List you would have to have a custom view that shows the Contact's related Accounts, and then they pick one to manage from the portal (passing the Account Id across to be used for any Entity Forms). Unfortunately out-of-box the portal is based on the Company Name field which only allows a single account related to a Contact, but you could tweak your views on the portal to adhere to the N:N relationship. What we have also done for some clients is built a custom "Account Contact" entity that links both the Account and Contact along with some additional information. The benefit of this is then you only have to create a record in order to link a Contact to an Account rather than dealing with OOB N:N relationships and associating/disassociating.

Apologies for the wave of information but hopefully this helps you! I would appreciate you marking this as complete if it answered your questions!

Thanks,

Matt Bayes

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