I have been googling information about it. In my mind this is fantastic functionality that clients want but setting it up and maintaining it can be difficult. The main problem I have is to use a portal you have to set up a seperate website and then it’s a case of managing the security settings and I am not to hot with security settings. The major benefit of the portal is it does provide a method of doing the security settings and managing this from within CRM.
I also tried to setup the portal once and it was a day of frustration before I got had to leave it.
my experience shouldn’t scare people off, I bet there are loads of people who have successfully got CRM portals working.
I thought I would list the portal information I have found
The first is slightly unusual but the Customer Portal is listed twice on the market place, one has one review of 5 stars and the other has 9 reviews of an average of 3.5. This does seem quite low for a Microsoft endorsed accelerator (1o reviews!)
I have found a video on setting up the Customer portal
The link below has some FAQ’s about setting up and getting starting with portals. It contains some of the common problems you might run up agaisn’t so if you are having trouble it would be worth visiting the site below
I found a video going through setting up the Customer portal for CRM 2011. It could do with having more videos, blogs and walkthrough on setting up the portals because they can be quite difficult.
Interesting I noticed there is a whole section in the CRM 2011 SDK on portals