Introduction to Power Apps Portals

 Introduction

                To increase the availability of portal software, Microsoft has recently replaced their older Dynamics 365 Portals with the new Power Apps Portals. The new program is designed to be an easier to use option with less coding needed for companies that want to create portals for their customers to access information Power Apps Portals can be used for a wide variety of purposes. Because it connects natively with Microsoft’s Common Data Service, Power Apps Portals can provide any information stored on the Microsoft Dynamics suite. This blog is intended to be a short guide on how to get started with a Power Apps Portal environment for those who are completely unfamiliar with the anatomy of the program.

                   Apps Portals is a very useful tool despite its relative youth. Microsoft is committed to providing businesses with the ability to connect with their clients with relatively little hassle or extra costs that may be associated with normal portal maintenance. It is likely that there are more features and updates coming to the platform to allow portals to fulfill a wide variety of business applications. 

                To make full use of Power Apps Portals, or to implement extensive customization of the portal, custom code is available. Power Apps Portals uses both standard browser languages and a relatively new and simple language called Liquid. Microsoft provides several guides for getting started with Liquid in their Power Apps documentation. Liquid works very well with existing Dynamics 365 architecture so that elements and entities of Dynamics can be brought into Power Apps relatively easily. To add custom code to the portal, navigate to the bottom of the screen and select the code symbol (</>) next to the save function. This will open up the page’s basic code which can have custom JavaScript, CSS, or HTML embedded into it. To use JavaScript or CSS, simply use the script and style tags as is common in web development. When a new component is created on the page, the component’s interactable code will be automatically generated at the bottom of the file. It can then be modified like any other element. Interestingly, this code editor allows for both Liquid coding and the browser languages simultaneously. It is highly likely that there will be several sections of Liquid and browser language on a given page’s code.

Power Apps portals capabilities

            Power Apps portals are built on top of Dataverse. This architecture comes with a major benefit. All the differentiating features of model-driven Power Apps are the features of Power Apps portals as well, including:

    *Centralized management

    *Common Data Model

    *Roles and permissions

    *Forms and views

    *Business rules

    *Declarative workflows and actions

    *Plug-in architecture

    *Integration with other services

    *Dataverse extensibility

    *Audit

Key Benefits and Features of Power Apps Portals

1.Fast development – a portals solution can be built in days

2.Professional appearance – an interactive and smart appearance that matches your company branding

3.Engage with external users – give internal and external users secure access to your data, either anonymously or through commercial authentication provides such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Microsoft, or enterprise providers

3.Connect your data – bring together your data to enrich your portal with forms, charts, and dashboards

4.Boost customer service – enable customers to contact you via self-service customer portals

5.Secure engagement – data exchanges through a portal remains secure and can be controlled through reliable authentication methods

6.Access from anywhere – access your portals from smartphones, tablets, or desktops, enabling you to access them wherever you are

7.Easy to manage – content can be updated and new resources added with ease by internal administrators