Add value to Dynamics 365 with Power Apps Portals

Power Apps Portals

Connecting Employees, Customers, and Partners to your Business

Consumers are a major driver of the self-service web portal trend.
Consider these data points:

• The majority of global consumers now expect brands and organizations to offer a self-service portal.
• Nearly one-third of consumers keep in touch with brands they’ve done business with to make sure that they are getting the most out of their purchase.
• Half of the consumers are using multiple channels to stay connected, including web, mobile, telephone, social, and self-service channels. Often, consumer use many channels for a single support experience.

Connecting Employees, Customers, and Partners to your Business

Web portals empower the segment of online consumers who prefer to research and locate information on their own. Power Apps portals give businesses a way to provide an easy-to-use, self-service experience, using less time and money than developing a custom solution. Not only can information within the portal be optimally organized, the searchability of the knowledge base delivers the exact information consumers are looking for along with the ability to transition to a traditional customer support interface, if required.

Web portals offer businesses a way to pull information together and present it to their customers, partners, and employees. However, selecting new software and new vendors combined with integrating it across all business applications tends to be cumbersome. Microsoft Dynamics 365 users can leverage Power Apps portals, an extension of the Power Platform, to build responsive websites using less time and money than traditional web development tools and plug-ins. Power Platform portals are a great way to share information between internal and external groups as well as digitize manual processes.

What is a Power Apps Portal

Power Apps Portals enable businesses using Dynamics 365 to create custom websites with pages, layouts, and content in a quick and efficient manner. Using templates, forms, and connectivity to Microsoft’s Cloud, Dataverse, websites can be created using the same low-code framework as the Power Apps Platform. The websites offer high flexibility to businesses since they can be both internal and external facing and can easily connect with data stored in the cloud. The end solution is brandable and can be personalized to suit individual business needs and use cases, including the following features:

• Content: Seamless, responsive, and customizable web design.
• Functionality: Low-code framework, tracks customer interactions across channels via Dataverse.
• Extensibility: Integrate with Microsoft services such as SharePoint or Power BI, or custom software based on business scenarios.
• Security: All data is protected through the Dataverse security model.

Portal Use Cases

The best way to understand how you might be able to leverage Power Apps portals to benefit your business is to first look at the available portal templates. These predefined power apps templates make it easy for businesses to provision a portal of their own using existing staff.

• Community Portal: A community portal leverages peer-to-peer interactions between customers and experts to organically grow the catalog of available knowledge from knowledge base articles, forums, and blogs as well as providing feedback through comments and ratings.
• Customer Self Service: A customer self-service portal enables customers to access self-service knowledge, support resources, view the progress of their cases, and provide feedback.
• Partner Portal: A partner portal allows every organization with resellers, distributors, suppliers, or partners to have real-time access to every stage of shared activities.
• Employee Self Service: An employee self-service portal creates an efficient and well-informed workforce by streamlining common tasks and empowering every employee with a definitive source of knowledge.
• Customer Portal: Allows companies to create an externally facing website that is connected to customer account, order and invoice information for B2B workflows.

How to Get Started Creating a Power Apps Portal?

One of the main benefits of using the Power Apps portals to create responsive websites is that you don’t need a technical resource to do it. Any organization using Microsoft Dynamics 365 can train their analytical staff or developers on deploying a Power Platform portal. However, you may need to modify the existing templates to fit your business, and there’s a Custom portal option for other use cases. In addition, there are also benefits to selecting a Microsoft Partner to complete the work for you.

TrellisPoint is a Gold Partner specializing in Microsoft Dynamics 365. Our team is skilled in implementing, integrating, and optimizing Customer Engagement business applications, including the Power Platform. We leverage decades of experience with Microsoft, Salesforce and Infor CRM (formerly Sales Logix) to deliver superior solutions that yield high value outcomes for our customers. To-date we have developed a variety of Power Platform including stand-alone and integrated apps and portals.

If you think your business can benefit from using Power Apps portals, contact us to schedule a free project assessment today!

Learn more about Power Apps