Limitations of Dynamics 365 Portal

For the past few years, portals have been steadily coming into vogue. There are many reasons for this, including, but not limited to, durability, its ability to expand as you take on more users, and its wide array of features.

Even though it’s been around a hot minute, you may not know what a portal is exactly. Let’s clear it up with a definition from Wikipedia, “A web portal is a specially designed website that brings information from diverse sources, like emails, online forums, and search engines, together in a uniform way.”

The best way to describe a portal in layperson’s terms is that it is that essential bridge between CRMs and websites that provide secure access to vital data to employees, vendors, customers, or any additional party involved.

Multiple portals are available in the market today that help your company serve your customers better. Of all the companies out there in the ether that take a whirl at creating such portals, Microsoft takes the lead.

Microsoft bought an application called Adxstudio portals in 2015. Nowadays, it is available as an add-on subscription for Microsoft Dynamics 365. As Microsoft supports mobile and cloud, the portal has quickly become an important add-on of Dynamics 365, mainly due to its elasticity and range of capabilities. Using Microsoft Office 365, you can enable a portal.

Every coin has two sides, and so does a portal solution. With its many great advantages, there are some pitfalls you shouldn’t overlook. These limitations show up in the way it operates and is important to understand.

4 Limitations of the Dynamics 365 Portal

• Increased Cost

In the beginning, Dynamics 365 portal will give you a free portal. But that’s the only one that will come without a cost. If you want to make use of an additional portal, then that will cost extra. This additional cost is based on the page views.

• Unable To Handle Cache

Should you need to make changes or modify/update a few things in the users’ data on the CRM side, you will find that these changes or modifications are not directly reflected. You will have to make these changes manually, then clear the cache, and then these changes can be seen.

• There Is No On-Premise Support

For all of its products, Dynamics gives you cloud and server cloud support. Recently, they have turned all their support to cloud-first solutions. Hence, the portal is a cloud-based solution.

Your only option is to rely on cloud-based solutions when using the Dynamics portal. The benefit here is that you don’t have to invest in servers, but the drawback is that you must invest in cloud services.

• There Are No Server Code Adjustments

There are a lot of complications when it comes to Dynamics 365 portals. One of the main restrictions is the changing of the architecture of their products.

Let me illustrate it: you are trying to retrieve data of a particular customer using the name as an entity. Afterward, you are allowed to change the Name entity to another entity, such as address or phone number.

Although you cannot change the architecture of the method, the said entity is called. From this, it can be said that the architecture of portals is not that flexible or strong. And the developers are not allowed to change it.

Like everything, Dynamics 365 portal has its benefits and ill effects. In spite of these cons, Dynamics 365 portals are at the top of their field. In conclusion, we can say that Dynamics 365 portals are ideal for you if you can find a way around the above-mentioned limitations.

Alternative to Dynamics 365 Portal

If you decide that finding a way around these limitations is not your cup of tea, then there are many third-party portals available in the market that can help you. One such product is PortalXpand, a Dynamics 365 Portal.

Features include:

• Intuitive dashboard
• Case deflection
• Custom and default module support
• Contact hierarchy management
• Role-based accessibility
• Extensive knowledge base

You can take a trial of it to assess if it fits your need.

You can take a trial of it to assess if it fits your need. You can also check out how PortalXpand fairs as an alternative to PowerApps.

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