On October 27th, our Senior Solutions Architect, Mary Harvey, led guests on a live webinar through an in-depth introduction to Power Apps Portals. Although we have a video recording of the event on our site, we thought it would be helpful to recap the main points of this event since this is such a hot topic!
To start, the key feature that Power Apps Portals gives Microsoft 365 customers is the ability to create external-facing websites from within Microsoft 365. Of course, you are currently able to share your SharePoint sites externally, which works well collaborating with external users, but they must use a Microsoft associated account to log into your tenant and access the content. With Power Apps Portals, you can create external-facing websites for anonymous users as well as authenticated users. And there are multiple ways to authenticate users on these new sites using Azure AD, Azure B2C, Open ID, or local login accounts. These sites are all built on top of Microsoft Dataverse which can be easily customized for your portal site.
After you create your portal site, you see the associated Dataverse already populated with a number of tables for accounts, contacts, entities, forms, lists, templates, settings, pages, files, and more. There is also a Portal Management app that helps you manage all of the portal information that is in Dataverse. There is a separate portal app created that is the actual portal site accessed by end users, but also provides a user-friendly content editing interface for your content contributors.
Mary then gives viewers a detailed demo on how to set up a starter portal. All that viewers need to be able to do this is a Power Platform environment with a Dataverse attached. Mary begins her in-depth demo at around minute seven of the video recording.
Building Power Apps Portals are a great way to solve business problems and connect with others such as business partners, vendors, or clients. To create a robust Power Apps Portal, you will need to pull together a team of knowledgeable employees. You will need business strategists to form the plan of what you need and how that will impact your business. You will need IT admins to assist with permissions and tenant administration duties. Finally, you will need at least one tech savvy individual to customize the infrastructure of the site and then some low code tech team members who are able to help with the bulk of the work. Assembling a great team will allow you to create and maintain a successful site.
To get a better understanding of exactly how to create a site, we recommend you watch the full video recording from our webinar. However, we hope this blog gives you some insight into why you may want to create a Power Apps Portal site and what you can expect in doing so. If you have any questions for Mary or want to continue the conversation about Power Apps Portals, please contact us today!
