Portal Solutions

Dynamics 365 Portals are a complex beast to manage with many parts. These including the following:

• The content and layout - all stored as records in Dynamics 365

• The webserver that renders the website - automatically created and managed in Azure

• Solutions to install in an instance

To install a portal, in the administration center, navigate to the relevant instance, click on the relevant portal type (such as customer self-service) and then click Install. This triggers the installation of multiple managed solutions in the selected instance. The solutions adds the entities relevant to portals. Review this article, Provision a Portal to determine the portal solution that has the features that you need. If you need features from more than one portal then you need to install both solutions and mess around with website records - but that is another story.

To manage a portal, in the administration center, navigate to applications, select the portal name and then manage. The number of actual portal websites you have available is determined by licensing. All customer engagement plans with more than a certain number of licences are granted a portal at no additional cost. Over and above this, you can purchase additional portals.

To delete a portal solutions, you must delete the solutions individually in the Solutions area of your instance. There is no single button to remove all portal solutions.

Furthermore, because of the dependencies between the solutions you need to delete them in a specific order. To help me figure this out, I installed a Customer Self-Service portal solution in an instance with no portal solutions and noted the order in which the solutions were installed. I then added the Community portal solution and noted the additional solutions that were installed.

Customer Self-Service Portal

The solution installation order (from first to last):

• Get Record ID Workflow Helper

• Bings Maps Helper

• Portal Dependencies

• Portal Base

• Portal Base System Workflows

• Portal Base Workflows

• Web Notification

• Identity

• Identity System Workflows

• Identity Workflows

• Web Forms

• Feedback

• Discussion Forums

• Discussion Forums Workflows

• Timeline

• Customer Service

• Knowledge Management

• Azure Storage

• Base HTML Editor

• Customer Self-Service Portal

This is twenty solutions. To uninstall, delete the solutions starting with the last one and working backwards.

Community Portal

After installing the Customer Self-Service portal I added the Community Portal:

The following solutions were added (from first to last):

• Blogs

• Community Ideas

• Community Ideas Workflows

• Community Badges

• Community Portal

Note, that after selecting the Community Portal solution, it took around 20 minutes for the installation status to change from "installation pending" to "installing".