I am looking into portals because we have to switch to using one for our distributor partners next year. Today they sign in directly with Azure B2B accounts, but the licensing details are changing and we have to shift to a portal.
As part of that shift, I have so many questions. one of them is - it appears that unless you convert a portal to "Production", it goes away after 30 days. How do people do development on portals? In my world, we have two sandbox Dynamics 365 environments and one production. We do our development & testing in the lower environments and migrate solutions up to production. I imagined portal development lifecycle to work the same way.
I know some companies do everything on production which just doesn't fly where I work. One of the dynamics consultants we hired initially (back in 2015) advised us just to have a Prod environment because, according to them, nothing showed up in Prod until you "published" the solution. However, that is a) patently false and b) very risky since it doesn't allow for testing. Spoiler alert - we fired them.
any tips anyone has about how to set up a good portal development lifecycle are welcome.
