Power App Portals

• What is a Portal:  These are the websites that can be created using power apps which can include data from Data verse. 
• Before you start using portals you need to import portal solution packages into your environment.
• You can create 50 startup portals within one environment if you are using "Start from Blank". It does come with sample data and sample pages.
• If you are using Dynamics 365 templates then you can use only 1 in each language. But you can still have 50 different portals per environment. 
• It takes 20 to 25 min to provision the portals.

          Portal Templates

• Several templates are available to use to create portals. If you don't have Dynamics 365, only portal you can use is "Portal from blank" 

• If you select an environment that contains Microsoft Dataverse, you can create a Dataverse starter portal. The Dataverse starter portal comes with the sample data for you to quickly get started. It also has the following built-in sample pages:

• Default studio template
• Page with title
• Page with child links
• Contact us
• For creating the portals using Dynamics templates: go to Create a portal with an environment containing customer engagement apps.
• However, you need to have environment that uses Dynamics 365, sales, customer service, field service, marketing or project service automation, then you will have access to templates. 
• Some examples of portal templates: Portal templates - Power Apps | Microsoft Docs
• Little bit more about: Customer self service portal and Employee self service portal: Both are useful for content and knowledge management, forums, support and case management, comments, subscribers. Employee self service has dynamics 365 AD directory build into it, while in customer template anyone can login to. Community portal: Content and knowledge management, pier to pier interaction, forums, comments, blogs, ratings, case history management. Partner portal: to communicate with resellers, distributers, suppliers and partners. knowledge management, process service integration. 
• For PL900 exam you should know first four portals exist. And you need to know which one include profile management or blogs etc. 

       Now let's see what all we can do with portals or different portal customizations that we can use:

1. You can add pages from left side of the screen and use different templates. 

1. In addition you can have themes: There are inbuild themes called basic themes. And you can also use CSS to create the theme of your own. And you can change various aspects of the theme by changing the properties on right hand side of the screen. CSS can give you various customizations. 
2. Lastly we can add different sections to the portal: two column, three column etc.
3. You can also add components like text, image, form, list, breadcrumbs etc.
4. You can also add iframe(inline frame) use to embedded document.
5. We can also insert the elements from Power BI. But to include power BI dashboards you will need to set up necessary permissions in admin center by going to : Set up power bi integration
6. You can insert "form". You can create a new one or use the existing form from existing library. 
7. Note: There is no Save button. It autosaves the data.

• User Authentication: 

1. There are various identity providers that portal app can use. However, Azure active directory is recommended way to sign in.

1. For customer facing portals you can use fb, linked in, google etc.
2. You also can use local sign in if you are using the website for internal purposes. Microsoft does not recommend using local sign in. 
3. Power Apps portals admin center - Power Apps | Microsoft Docs
   
   
   5.  You can control access on the level of web pages as well. If you go to the web page and click on "Access Control Rules" you can say who can have access to that particular web page. One web role is anonymous and rest are authenticated. 

        

Resources used: Portal templates - Power Apps | Microsoft Docs