Blogs September 2019

Redirecting in the portal is straightforward but syntax is important!

In theming a portal to look-and-feel like a corporate web site, I run across a variety of items that I'm grouping in this blog.

I recently came across a technical requirement to remove the banner graphic from the top of the default Forum page of the Community Portal. This was a little trickier than expected!

As with many portal projects, the logo typically is the first to be changed. One consequence of inserting a large(r) logo may be that it descends below the menu bar bottom position thus overlapping the breadcrumb element. If you don't want to resize the graphic height to fit within the menu bar then add some padding.

A new feature with the latest release is the ability to redirect users to a 'Under Construction' page and prevent anyone from accessing the site.

Portal project follow general Dynamics project plans but include [1], interface and process definitions not just for administrators and user roles of the native Dynamics application but also for administrators and user roles of the portal application and [2], greater interface detail is required to be defined of the portal interface components. In other words, processes and interfaces are more complicated and require greater attention to detailing and successfully building their behavior.

The Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement portal authenticates logins against a 'web portal' enabled Contact record.  Authorization is provided by the .NET platform. In addition to this local authentication process, authentication can be enabled to allow Facebook, Google, and Azure AD to authenticate. Where client requirements look to restrict 'data at rest' and 'data in transit' to specific geographic locations, it is likely that these authentication methods are disabled.