I was asked about portals and CRM 2011 today.
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
FAQ for Customer and Partner Portals
There is also a whole section in the CRM 2011 SDK
Portal Developer Guide for Microsoft Dynamics CRM
The document above is very useful, below are the sections it covers
- Prepare for Portal Development
- Prepare for portal development and read about best practices.
- ASP.NET Web Forms and Data Binding
- Learn how to use the portal toolkit for data binding into Web forms.
- Manage Portal Content
- Learn about content management with the portal toolkit.
- Portal Authentication
- Learn about authentication with the portal toolkit.
- Use the Web Site Copy Tool
- Learn how to use the Web site copy tool.
- Portal Walkthroughs
- Step-by-step instructions on how to create a portal console application, plug-in and Web application.
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