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How We Implement Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Web Portals

A self-service web portal is a great way to extend the reach of Dynamics 365 and improve service quality by enabling customers to log issues, find solutions and update information online.

Following the October 2019 licensing change, all Dynamics 365 customers are entitled to deploy PowerApps Portals, regardless of licence volume. Furthermore, multiple portals can be deployed to cover non-production requirement and addition usage scenarios without the need to license each portal. Portal licensing is now based on external usage.

Preact has successfully helped many of our customers implement integrated portals and in many instances we do this as a fixed price service.

Dynamics offers several portal templates but the most popular, and the one covered by our fixed price package, is the customer self-service web portal which we use as a base template.

Fixed Price Web Portal Build

Our customisation of the customer service portal base template includes:

Skinning the portal to reflect the look of your corporate website to include your logo, colours and other branding
Setting-up security web roles to for portal access and management
Configure Cases integration that will enable portal users to view existing Cases and log new support issues - this will include building processes to automatically send email notifications when new Cases are created
Displaying up to two existing Dynamics 365 custom entities through the web portal (additional time will be required if new records for these entities need to be created by users within the portal with supporting email notifications)
Enabling portal users to update their standard contact information stored in Dynamics 365, including name, address, email and phone number
Configure an integrated knowledge base, if required
Enabling a portal forum, if required

As a fixed price engagement, our Dynamics 365 portal build will cover:

A scoping consultancy to discuss your customer service portal requirement and objectives (half day)
Documentation write-up to define your requirement and detail how Preact will deliver this work (half day)
Building your web portal
A review session in which we will present the portal and collect your feedback (half day)
Implementing portal customisations and changes following the review
Project management of your portal implementation

What Next?

Your fixed price portal implementation can be completed using inclusive Dynamics hours from a Preact managed service agreement, or this can be billed separately as a one-off project.

To complete the portal activation, email integration will need to be set-up to send invitation emails and subsequent portal messages. An additional cost will apply if you require Preact to configure this for you.

Contact us to discuss your portal requirements and arrange a quotation for our fixed price portal implementation.