What’s New in Dynamics 365 portals

A number of the Dynamics 365 application services; Field Service, Project Service and portals, all became generally available this week following the release of Dynamics 365 earlier this month. These all offer a number of improvements and new features from their previous iterations under Dynamics CRM. Previously called CRM portals, now Dynamics 365 portals, has received some significant updates, even some functionality that starts to bring the 3 application services together with Project and Field Service functionality now in some portals. Let’s take a look at some of the largest changes in this release:

• Multilingual support for a single portal
  Any of the now 43 languages can be configured on a portal and no longer requires a completely separate portal service for each language.  This functionality also significantly differs from how multilingual support was included in the legacy Adxstudio Portals. You will find a new entity, Website Languages that adds an additional layer, this instead of duplicating the entire web site using the old web site copy tool.  The page copy section is no longer directly on the web page information form but now available through a localized content relationship which will display the web page in a new content mode and other content data entities like content snippet or site settings also have new relationships to the website language.
  
  
  There are also new liquid extensions to support this functionality within your own templates, website.languages will provide a collection of all the language items, pages.languages is a list of languages for the current page available, and website.selected_language will identity what language the site is currently being shown in.
• Charts displayed in the portal
  You can now embed your CRM/Dynamics 365 charts directly on the web with a new liquid extension.  For an example of charts, if you install the latest partner portal there is a new web template called “Partner Dashboard” that provides an example of embedding multiple charts, entity lists and other components on a single page to give a rich interface to portal users. The liquid extension makes it very easy to add a chart anywhere in a page, all you need is the chart ID and view ID the chart should use for its data source.
  

  {% chart id:"chart-guid-without-braces" viewid:"view-guid-without-braces" %}
  
  <!-- Est. Revenue by Est. Close Date (Day) - Opportunities Closing Next Month --> 
  {% chart id:"EB02E9AA-5580-E611-80D8-00155DFE75F9" viewid:"00000000-0000-0000-00AA-000010003002" %}
  

  

• Content Access Level Security for Knowledge Management Articles
  Content Access Level or CAL is a feature that has been added to allow for securing access to knowledge articles to different groups of users. In Dynamics 365 with a portal installed you will find some sample CALs but you can also define your own and associate them to contacts and articles. Article content will be secured regardless of how you try accessing the content, either browsing via navigation elements, direct URL or via the Portal Search, all will respect the security rules defined by the CAL.
• Project Service and Field Service Portal Extensions
  If you provision a new Partner Portal and have either Project Service or Field Service installed you will see some new options available that allow you to enable portal functionality for these components, there are also new actions if you have an existing portal to install the new portal extensions.
  
  These extensions bring some components to the portal, with PSA your able to view customer and partner related projects or resources. With Partner Field Service extension you can see related field service agreements, assets, service requests, and work orders.
• Partner Portal Improvements
  There are a number of improvements and new functionality added to the popular partner portal including a new partner onboarding/application, multi-partner collaboration, and also deal registration.

These are all great improvements for this release and continue to look forward to further updates with the monthly updates to Portal Service in the new year. If you want to check out these features and more you can try the latest version yourself by requesting a trial.

For more information about what’s new for Field Service and Project Service a breakdown is available on the What’s New for Dynamics 365 Help and Training site.

Note: This post also appears on Adoxio Business Solutions Team Blog.